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THE END OF THE WORLD: 



WITH 



NEW INTERPRETATIONS OF HISTORY. 




THE 



END OF THE WORLD: 



WITH NEW INTERPRETATIONS OF HISTORY. 



, BY 
WILLIAM H. HOLCOMBE, M.D., 

AUTHOR OF " OUR CHILDREN IN HEAVEN," " THE OTHER LIFE," " THE LOST TRUTHS 
OF CHRISTIANITY," ETC. 



fr 



u Upon whom the ends of the world are come." — 1 Cor. x. 11. 



• ktA.H!>r 



PHILADELPHIA: 

J. B. LIPPINCOTT & CO. 

LONDON: 16 SOUTHAMPTON STREET, STRAND. 
1881. 



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• Hfcfc 



Copyright, 1881, by J. B. Lippincott & Co. 



V 



CONTENTS. 



PAGE 

Preface . . . . . 7 

CHAPTEE I. 
Fundamentals 9 

CHAPTEE II. 
The Dead Church 22 

CHAPTEE III. 
The Dead Churches 64 

CHAPTEE IV. 
Proofs from the "Word of God 80 

CHAPTEE V. 
Proofs from the Word (Continued) .... 112 

CHAPTEE VI. 
Proofs from History 142 

CHAPTEE VII. 
Proofs from History (Continued) .... 172 

CHAPTEE VIII. 

The New Heayen and the New Earth . . . 203 

1* 5 



6 CONTENTS. 

CHAPTER IX. 

PAGE 

The Book Opened 228 

CHAPTER X. 
The Judgment and its Effects 264 

CHAPTER XL 
Confirmations from the Word 296 

CHAPTER XII. 
"What Next and Last? 330 

CHAPTER XIII. 
The Keys of History 373 



PEEFAOE. 



fTlHE editors of the Christian Union, Revs. Henry 
-*- Ward Beecher and Lyman Abbott, very far in 
advance of their co-religionists, present the following 
as " a tentative and hypothetical view" of the great 
subjects, which will be unfolded, by the Lord's will, 
in this volume : 

" The last day has already dawned ; the end of 
the world has come ; the judgment has begun ; Christ 
has entered into His glory ; God hath already made 
Him to be both Lord and Christ ; His fan is in His 
hand; He sits on the throne of His glory, judging 
the nations of the earth ; the hour now is when the 
dead hear the voice of the Son of God, and hearing 
live ; they are hourly and momentarily coming forth, 
they that have done good to the resurrection of life, 
and they that have done evil to the resurrection of 
damnation." (Christian Union, May 12, 1880.) 

These " tentative and hypothetical" statements of 
the Christian Union, involving a spiritual interpreta- 
tion of the second coming of Christ, the end of the 



8 PREFACE. 

world, the resurrection of the dead, and the final 
judgment, will be asserted dogmatically in this 
work, substantiated by unquestionable proofs, and 
by light drawn from hitherto unknown or discred- 
ited sources, will be explained in the clearest man- 
ner ; so that the believer in divine revelation may 
know in a large measure the when, the how, and the 
wherefore of the great events which have already 
happened, and make plausible conjectures of the 
still more stupendous revolutions which are destined 
to occur. 

Any philosophical or theological system which 
fulfils these promises, will give us a new glimpse 
of the Philosophy of History, and of that golden 
chain of providence, which holds all things in con- 
sistence, and binds the beginning and the end of the 
world together. 



THE END OF THE WORLD: 



WITH 



NEW INTERPRETATIONS OF HISTORY. 



CHAPTER I. 

FUNDAMENTALS. 



/"CHEMICAL combinations in the human body do 
^ not produce life : they are only the conditions 
under which life is manifested. 

There is no life in the universe but the uncreated 
life of God, who is the infinite, self-existing, and 
perpetual fountain of life. 

The manifestation of life depends upon the mo- 
lecular constitution and arrangement of the forms 
and structures into which it flows. 

All the so-called forces of nature pre-exist in the 
spiritual world as spiritual forces : and become 



10 THE END OF THE WORLD. 

natural forces when they flow into the molecules 
of physical structures. Thus the Divine Love be- 
comes the heat and the Divine Wisdom the light of 
the material universe. 

The spiritual and natural worlds are therefore 
consociated like the soul and body of man : and the 
natural exists and persists from moment to moment 
only by the influx of the spiritual into it. 

Our life is not a creation of God in us, but a gift 
to us: an inbreathing of life from Himself. All 
things exist, consist, and live from moment to 
moment by this inflowing breath of God. 

" And the Lord God formed man from the dust of the 
ground (the organic conditions), and "breathed into his 
nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living soul" 
Gen. ii. 17. 

" The breath of the Almighty hath given me life." Job 
xxxiii. 4. 

" He giveth to all life and breath and all things." Acts 
xvii. 25. 

" In whom we live, move, and have our being." Acts 
xvii. 28. 

" He is before all things and by Him all things con- 
sist." Col. i. 17. 

The pantheistic theory is not true, for so soon as 
life, the divine gift, passes into the organic struc- 



FUNDAMENTALS. H 

tures of the human spirit, it ceases to be God's life, 
and becomes man's life, subject to man's will, which 
is capable of reacting, if it chooses, against God. 
Otherwise it would either be God or an unconscious 
automaton. Hence the free agency and moral re- 
sponsibility of man. 

II. 

God's life is the Divine Love, and our life is our 
love, manifested by means of our affections. 

To our finite perceptions the universe consists of 
ourselves and others, the ego and the non-ego. 

Our love therefore is twofold, egoistic and al- 
truistic, the love of self and the love of others. 

God has no self-love because He is infinite : and 
we approach to God in proportion as we are dead to 
self and alive to others. 

The least predominance of the egoistic loves over 
the altruistic loves disturbs the moral order of the 
universe. 

" Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself." 

The voluntary surrender of our own will to God's 
will, which is done by obeying His commandments, 
effects a co-operative union between God's life and 
our life, so that God's will works in us both towards 
ourselves and others. 



12 THE END OF THE WORLD. 

God identifies Himself with His children, and 
acknowledges as love to Himself that love which is 
shown to His creatures. 

" Inasmuch as ye have done it to one of the least of 
these, my brethren, ye have done it unto me." 

" Inasmuch as ye did it not to one of the least of these, 
ye did it not to me" 

When self-love yields its place to God's love, we 
love God as we had loved ourselves, and we love 
our neighbor as God loves us. 

" This is my commandment, that ye love one another 
as I have loved you ." 

III. 

The commandments of God are the expressions 
of His will, and therefore of His life and His love : 
for we will what we love. 

They are the laws of being which He would obey 
Himself, were He finite like us. Christ fulfilled 
every jot and tittle of the law. 

To obey the commandments of God is to co-ope- 
rate with Him, to be at one with Him, to become 
like Him. It is the covenant between God and 
man. 

Religion is such a union of the Soul with God 



FUNDAMENTALS. 13 

that the divine life and will are carried out into the 
life and conduct of the individual. 

True religion is therefore a vital thing, a life, and 
not a creed or system. 

There is religion and religiosity : religiosity is 
external without internal religion, a creed without 
a corresponding life, ritualism without holiness. 

Religiosity is always the product of false doc- 
trines. 

We are united to God. and therefore saved, not by 
creeds or ceremonies, but by the filial, conjugial, 
parental, fraternal, neighborly, and social affections, 
which are the forms of God's life in us, and by the 
performance of the duties they involve and demand 
of us. 

We are christians only as we live, love, think, 
feel, and act in a Christ-like manner. All else is 
sounding brass and tinkling cymbal. 

" They which live should not henceforth live unto them- 
selves, but unto Him" 

" If any man have not the Spirit of Christ, he is none 
of His." 

" Christ liveth in me, and the life I now live in the 
flesh, Hive by the faith of the Son of God." 

We may profess what faith we please, but we 
have no religion but that which always shows itself 



14 THE END OF THE WORLD. 

in every one of the minutest actions of our lives. 
We are what we do. 

"By their fruits shall ye know them. 11 

IV. 

The reaction of man's will against God's will is 
the cause of evil. The operation of man's under- 
standing in correspondence with his corrupt will is 
the cause of untruth or the false. 

The conduct of life is the only test of the God- 
like or Christly character of the man : but his con- 
ceptions of truth and duty determine the conduct 
of life, so that the degree of regeneration obtained 
depends upon the faith he professes. 

We are saved by faith, but only by faith in the 
truth, and the life it teaches. 

Truth leads to goodness, and goodness in turn 
begets a larger capacity of comprehending the truth. 
The perfect character comes from the perfect mar- 
riage of goodness and truth in the spirit and the 
life. 

The truth obeyed makes us free, enlightens us, 
sanctifies us, and saves us. If we are not free, en- 
lightened, sanctified, and saved, we have not obeyed 
the truth, or we have been putting our faith in false- 
hoods and not the truth. 



FUNDAMENTALS. 15 

As man has no life but that which is breathed 
into him by God, so he has no knowledge of spir- 
itual truth but that which has been revealed from 
heaven. 

The Church is the depository and guardian of re- 
vealed truth, and the bond of connection between 
hgaven and earth, between God and man. 

The Church, as an external organization, is re- 
sponsible for the interpretation of revealed truth. 
As genuine truth leads to spiritual goodness, so the 
least corruption or falsification of it leads to a cor- 
respondingly inferior degree of good, until at last 
false doctrines beget false lives. 

Falsification of doctrine begins always with some 
evil of life in the men of the Church, who justify, 
pall^te, or confirm their wrong-doing by a corre- 
sponding perversion of truth. Thus the love of 
spiritual dominion developed the theory of an in- 
fallible church, etc. 

When a Church has falsified the central doctrines 
of divine truth it goes on from bad to worse, until 
it is consummated with great and terrible judgments 
without and within. 

11 When nations are to perish in their sins, 
'Tis in the church the leprosy begins." 



16 THE END OF THE WORLD. 

" Judgment must begin at the house of God." 1 Peter 
iv. 17. 

This judgment is effected by a new revelation of 
divine truth, which always involves mighty changes 
both in the spiritual and natural worlds. 

The perishing Church does not realize its condi- 
tion, nor does it know that it is undergoing a judg- 
ment, but repudiates the new truth, and struggles 
desperately to maintain its ecclesiastical life. 

" He that loveth his life shall lose it, and he that hateih 
his life in this world shall keep it unto life eternal." 

V. 

There is an internal and an external Church 
which ought to cohere and correspond, but often 
do not. 

The interna] Church is "the kingdom of heaven" 
within the individual soul. Conjugial love is its 
centre, for the love between husband and wife is 
the effect of the Lord's love to His Church and the 
reciprocal love of the Church to the Lord. 

The unregenerate who live in mere natural love, 
know nothing of the spiritual origin of conjugial 
love, nor can they understand or believe it. 

The spiritual state of the individual, the family, 



FUNDAMENTALS. 17 

the Church, and the nation may be accurately- 
measured by the purity, devotion, chastity, and 
holiness of the marriage relation, and by the con- 
ception the sexes have of each other. 

From the love between the sexes, as from a sweet 
or bitter fountain, flow by derivation and kinship 
all other loves, parental, filial, fraternal, neighborly, 
and social. 

The spiritual state of the family is the test of its 
religion, and of the regenerative value of the doc- 
trines taught to it by the Church as divine truth. 

VI. 

The external or visible Church is an assemblage 
of individuals and families held together by com- 
mon bonds of religious faith and usages. It is a 
Church of God only by virtue of the truth and good, 
or of the Godlike and Christlike elements it may 
contain. 

A Church may backslide and retrograde like an 
individual. It may corrupt the faith and deteriorate 
the standard of life, until it ceases to be the Church 
of God, and precipitates a judgment upon itself and 
the world. 

No matter what it may profess or claim, no matter 

what its outward prosperity and power may be, its 

b 2* 



18 THE END OF THE WORLD. 

spiritual vitality, or openness to heaven and union 
with God, depend entirely on the reverence, obedi- 
ence, helpfulness, purity, truthfulness, chastity, in- 
dustry, honesty, charity, prayerfulness, humility, 
unselfishness, and mutual love of its members. 
These are the fruits of faith in genuine truth which 
is always married to genuine good. 

Creeds, dogmas, ceremonies are outward expres- 
sions, forms, and correspondences with which the 
religious idea is clothed and embodied, so that it 
may govern the life of man in all its relations. 
Their various changes are the results of a perpetual 
effort to readjust the external or institutional life 
of man into harmony with his interior conditions. 

The most secret and powerful springs in the phil- 
osophy of history are to be found in the revolutions 
of the religious idea. 

Historical development, theological and otherwise, 
is the evolution according to determinate natural 
and spiritual laws, of what was involved in the will 
and design of Divine Providence from the begin- 
ning. 

Every new revelation with its new Church is a 
discrete step in the common life of humanity, and 
the last is always indissolubly connected with all 
that preceded it, as a part of a perfect whole. 



FUNDAMENTALS. 19 

VII. 

The Church, as the depository of the oracles of 
God and the spiritual medium between heaven and 
earth, is the heart of the world. Through its chan- 
nels pulsate the life of God and the powers of 
heaven for the regeneration of mankind. 

The spiritual growth of the individual and the 
family depends entirely upon the kind of spiritual 
food provided for them by the Church. 

The state of the individual and the family deter- 
mine the state of the world. The Church is there- 
fore responsible, directly and indirectly, for the 
existing state of society. 

In a spiritual point of view, all men are in 
the Church, which is like the human body, mani- 
festing all degrees of life between its vital organic 
centres and its comparatively dead, inorganic pe- 
ripheries. 

As the blood is, so are the organs of the body : 
as the life of the Church is, so is the world. 

The data which reveal and explain all the condi- 
tions of the private and public life of any country 
are the following : 

The doctrines taught as truth by the prevailing 
system of religion : 



20 THE E] XD OF THE WORLD. 

The state of the marriage relation and of the 
family in church members : 

The life of brotherhood or solidarity which is 
brought into actual practice under the influence of 
the Church and its doctrines. 



vm. 

The religious idea, like all other things, is subject 
to the laws of evolution : and the world is as full 
of the debris of dead churches as it is of dead lan- 
guages, lost arts, and extinct civilizations. 

The priesthood or clergy are the prime agents in 
all the revolutions of the religious idea; and are 
therefore more potent for good or for evil than any 
other power in the world. 

They do not meet their responsibilities by teach- 
ing and practising their faith with great zeal and 
sincerity. 

A vaster, deeper, more awful responsibility lies 
upon them; that of keeping their minds open to 
the light of heaven ; of being expectant of change 
and judgment, knowing the past; of being watch- 
ful, sensitive, inquisitive; and frequently re-exam- 
ining the foundations of their faith, untrammelled 
by church traditions and authorities. 



FUNDAMENTALS. 21 

" If therefore the light within thee he darkness , how 
great is that darkness" 

Such are some of the fundamental principles of 
the spiritual life, and of a spiritual philosophy of 
life, which will be applied in analyzing the present 
state of society and religion throughout Christendom. 
They are touchstones of immense power, and the 
result of their application is exceedingly perplexing 
and discouraging. The revelations they make of 
the true state of the Church and the world are ap- 
palling to contemplate : and yet they are true. It 
will be necessary to use the utmost plainness and 
boldness of speech. Things must be called by their 
right names. What is discovered in the closets will 
be proclaimed upon the house-tops. It is no time 
for concealments or misplaced suavities when heaven 
and hell are opening around us, when the ends of 
the world are upon us, and the judgment has begun. 
Away alike with prejudices and sympathies ! Away 
with pretensions and delusions, both our own and 
others ! 

Room for the TRUTH ! 



CHAPTER II. 

THE DEAD CHUKCH. 

fTlHE real condition of the Christian Church is not 
-*- to be determined by outward appearances, by 
statistics of numbers and wealth, by manifestations 
of learning and power, or by the opinions and as- 
severations of its members, but by the rigid appli- 
cation of the laws of the spiritual life. One of 
these laws is, that the state of society is a good and 
true index of the value and vitality of the religious 
system dominant in that society. Christianity is 
amenable to this law, which has been unsparingly 
applied to Brahminism, Buddhism, Judaism, Ma- 
hometanism, and all the heathen systems, and is 
applied every day by Protestants to the Roman 
Catholic religion. 

The Church of Christ may be said to have gov- 
erned what we call the civilized world for fifteen 
hundred years. It has played an immense part in 
the production of all the good and all the evil of 

our modern life. Has it executed faithfully the 
22 



THE DEAD CHURCH. 23 

great mission assigned to it by its Divine Founder ? 
Has it perfectly regenerated the individual soul, has 
it purified the sexual relation, has it sanctified the 
family, has it illuminated, unitized, and perfected 
its membership, has it evangelized and fraternized 
the world ? Is the civilization which it has engen- 
dered the highest possible expression of love, peace, 
purity, justice, and brotherhood? Nothing less 
could be expected of a system of divine truth dom- 
inant over the minds and hearts of men for fifteen 
centuries ! 

Let us not deceive ourselves. Let us rise above 
all the pretensions and hypocrisies of the age, and 
above all those self-adulations and mutual congratu- 
lations that everywhere prevail, and let us examine 
our own hearts and the Church and the world by 
that Word of God, which is " quick and powerful, 
and sharper than any two-edged sword." Let us 
approach the subject in the truth-loving spirit of 
Latimer. When the bishops visited Henry VIII. 
upon his birthday, and each was expected to present 
him according to custom with a purse of gold, Lati- 
mer gave the king a copy of the Bible, open and 
marked at the passage, " Whoremongers and adul- 
terers God will judge." 

Look at our own country, the freest and most 



24 THE END OF THE WORLD. 

favored, and which ought to be the wisest and hap- 
piest on the globe, if the civilization of modern 
Christianity were productive of happiness and wis- 
dom. 

What do we see ? 

The spiritual desolation of the age in all its most 
painful forms. 

The differences, contentions, disintegrations, deca- 
dence, and helplessness of Christianity, associated 
with the most enormous pretensions and self-delu- 
sions. 

The baneful and often secret and concealed rav- 
ages of infidelity, rationalism, spiritism, and sen- 
sualism. 

The palpable decay of the old modesties and 
rectitudes of life. 

The sacrifice of all the moralities in the haste to 
get rich. 

The frequent desecration of marriage to the bar- 
baric level of bargain and sale. 

The multiplying absurdities and tyrannies of 
fashion. 

The amazing extravagance, dissipation, heartless- 
ness, and hypocrisies of society. 

The failing sense of the sacredness of obliga- 
tions. 



THE DEAD CHURCH. 25 

The shameless repudiation of debt, public and 
private. 

The neglect, falsehood, and evasion in the pay- 
ment of taxes. 

The enormous greed of employers, demanding 
the greatest possible service for the least remunera- 
tion. 

The widespread faithlessness in service and con- 
tract among all classes. 

The rule and ruin of hideous " rings" in politics, 
in business, and even in ecclesiastical circles. 

The alarming increase of intemperance, opium- 
eating, debauchery, the social evil, insanity, suicide, 
embezzlement, and all other crimes ; insanity alone 
increasing proportionately faster than population in 
every civilized country. 

The extraordinary sensationalism rampant every- 
where. 

The increase of emotional disorders, scrofula, 
blood-poisonings, blindness, deafness, monstrosities, 
etc., the hereditary products of a diseased civiliza- 
tion. 

The growing contempt of authority, recklessness 
of life, and laxity of the laws. The decline of 
patriotism without any compensating development 
of the cosmopolitan spirit. 



26 THE END OF THE WORLD. 

The selfishness, malignity, mendacity, and jobbery 
of parties. 

The gradual dying of the public conscience. 

The autocracy of money, meanly lording it over 
intellect, virtue, and labor. 

The waning power of duty : the apotheosis of 
pleasure : the reign of buffoonery. 

The astonishing fact that christians can consent 
to be rich and to grow richer amid all the want 
and suffering that surround them. 

That they squander in ostentatious displays and 
selfish appetites more money than would relieve all 
the necessities of the world. 

The official statement of the annual expenditures 
of the people of the United States for religious pur- 
poses is one dollar and ten cents per head ; for edu- 
cational purposes, two dollars and two cents per 
head; and for alcoholic liquors, seventeen dollars 
per head ! The nation consumes seven hundred 
millions of dollars' worth of intoxicating drinks 
every year! Can any one imagine the moral and 
physical evils, present and prospective, which are 
involved in that terrible fact? Are we tending, in 
the midst of our fifty thousand churches, to become 
a nation of drunkards, paupers, criminals, and 
lunatics ? 



THE DEAD CHURCH. 27 

The money expended by the enlightened nations 
of Europe in the maintenance of standing armies 
for the unchristian business of overawing, check- 
mating, or destroying each other, would give food, 
clothing, work, and education to every necessitous 
human being in their borders : and these nations are 
not pagan, but the finished products of Christian 
civilization ! 

Licentiousness, open or concealed, is spreading its 
subtle poisons without limit. Paris exists every- 
where. If the surfaces be such as we see them, 
what must the hidden recesses contain? "It is 
quite curious," says Ruskin, " how often the catas- 
trophe or the leading interest of a modern novel 
turns upon the want, both in maid and bachelor, of 
the common self-command which was taught to their 
grandmothers and grandfathers as the first element 
of ordinarily decent behavior." 

Fifty-five years ago when the first French ballet 
dancer bounded upon the stage in New York in 
short skirts and regulation tights, every lady in the 
dress-circle rose and left the building. Now crowds 
of christian people witness patiently and admiringly 
the dancing of troops of women, whose continuous 
approaches to apparent nudity have been regulated 
by the increasing demoralization of the popular taste. 



28 THE END OF THE WORLD. 

The crime against the unborn child, which de- 
stroys the parental instinct, encourages sensuality, 
and suppresses population, is as common to-day in 
the most enlightened christian communities as it 
ever was in pagan Rome. Of this detestable deed, 
says Dr. Storer, of Boston, who has collected an 
enormous amount of evidence on the subject, " the 
statements made, though simple and true, appear so 
astounding as to shock belief, and so degrading as 
to tend to lessen all faith in natural affection and 
general morality." 

Continuing these painful explorations in a differ- 
ent direction, what else do we see ? 

A press just as powerful for evil as for good ; not 
often thoroughly independent and truthful; some- 
times subservient or unscrupulous, catering to a 
vicious taste, disseminating falsehoods, familiarizing 
with crime; sometimes actually manufacturing, mis- 
guiding, and debauching public opinion in the in- 
terest of parties, cliques, or individuals. 

The wide diffusion and rapid increase of the 
gambling spirit in all shapes and among all classes. 

Thousands of men living by their wits, exploiting 
their neighbors, becoming enormously wealthy by 
speculation, without one stroke of honest labor. 

Combinations of rich men which control, and 



THE DEAD CHURCH. 29 

inflate or depress the markets of the world at will, 
the most detestable species of thievery ever in- 
vented. 

The abominable adulteration of food, medicines, 
and many articles of commerce. The chicanery, 
quackery, and false representations in every depart- 
ment of business. 

Politics reduced to a contemptible trade, the 
chief instruments of which are falsehood, purchase, 
bribery, corruption, and fraud. 

The obstructions and tardiness of justice; the 
venality of lawyers and officers of the law; the 
perpetuation of abuses. 

The wretched mismanagement of prisons, peni- 
tentiaries, hospitals, poor-houses, lunatic asylums, 
and other charitable institutions. 

The increasing sufferings and degradations of 
poverty, and the great augmentation of the danger- 
ous and vicious elements of society. 

The diffusion of a vile, cheap literature through 
all classes, children included, like an underground 
sewer, full of nameless putridities. 

And to add a crowning horror to these allega- 
tions, men professing the religion of Christ partici- 
pating in the spirit, the performance, or the profits 

of all these evils ! 

3* 



30 THE END OF THE WORLD. 

It is not especially wonderful that these things 
exist, for most of them have existed in some form 
and with varying intensity in all ages and countries, 
but it is exceedingly wonderful and pitiful that they 
not only exist, but are increasing with fearful rapid- 
ity, in our full blaze of scientific and rational light, 
and in the midst of a church which has possessed 
the Word of God, and which has guided the human 
heart and taught the human understanding for 
eighteen hundred years. 

Forty-five years ago Sir Archibald Alison, the 
English historian, announced this downward move- 
ment of society, and the inefficiency of education 
and intellectual progress to remedy the evil : 

" Were they (the Romans) not prating about the 
lights of the age and the unparalleled state of social 
refinement, when the swords of Alaric and Attila 
were already drawn ? In the midst of all our ex- 
cursions have we yet penetrated that deepest of all 
mysteries, the human heart? With all our improve- 
ments have we eradicated one evil passion, or ex- 
tinguished one guilty propensity in that dark foun- 
tain of evil? Alas! facts, clear, undeniable facts 
prove the reverse. With the spread of knowledge, 
and the growth of every species of social improve- 
ment, general depravity has gone on increasing with 
an accelerated pace, both in France and England, 



THE DEAD CHURCH. 31 

and every increase of knowledge seems but an addi- 
tion to the length of the lever by which vice dis- 
solves the fabric of society. 

" The curious tables of Mr. Guerrin prove that 
in every department of France without exception, 
general depravity is just in proportion to the exten- 
sion of knowledge. ' At one throw/ says the can- 
did Mr. Bulwer, ■ he has bowled down all our pre- 
conceived ideas on this vital subject/ 

"'It is not simple knowledge/ continues this 
sagacious writer, ' it is knowledge detached from 
religion which produces this fatal result; and un- 
happily this is precisely the species of knowledge 
which is the present fervent object of popular de- 
sire. The reason of its corrupting tendency on 
morals is evident : when so detached, it multiplies 
the passions and desires of the heart without any 
increase to its regulating principles ; it augments the 
attacking without strengthening the resisting powers, 
and thence the disorder and license it spreads through 
society. The invariable characteristic of a corrupt 
and declining state of society is a progressive in- 
crease in the force of passion, and a progressive de- 
cline in the influence of duty, and this tendency so 
conspicuous in France, so evidently beginning among 
ourselves, is increased by nothing so much as that 
spread of education without religion, which is the 
manifest tendency of the present times/ 

" What makes it painfully clear that this corrup- 
tion has not only begun but is far advanced is the 



32 THE END OF THE WORLD. 

evident decline in the effect of moral character upon 
political influence. Depravity of character, sordid- 
ness of disposition, recklessness of conduct, are now 
no security whatever against political demagogues 
wielding the greatest political influence, nay, to their 
being held up as the objects of public admiration, 
and possibly forced upon the government of the 
country. The commission of political crimes, the 
stain of guilt, the opprobrium of disgrace, are no 
objections whatever with a large and influential 
party, provided they possess the qualities necessary 
to ensure success in their designs." 

This rapid moral deterioration in the midst of 
great intellectual and social progress is conspicuously 
exhibited in the people and government of our own 
country. The increase of knowledge without re- 
ligion which our free school system is especially 
calculated to foster, the degradation of morals, the 
growth of general depravity, the creation of monop- 
olies, the combinations of capital, the violence of 
parties, the corruption of politics, the deification of 
wealth, and the unsolved problems clamoring for 
solution, the negro question, the Chinese question, 
the Catholic question, the woman question, the tem- 
perance question, the labor question, etc., etc., all 
make us painfully aware that our republic is still 
an experiment; that democracy is a transition state 



THE DEAD CHURCH. 33 

incapable of persistence ; and that our society bears 
in its bosom the elements of incessant conflict and 
final dissolution. 

Let us now enumerate the larger evils which are 
producing the degenerate condition of the world, 
and which include the minor evils we have men- 
tioned, as a state includes its counties. They are 
the following : 

The competitive system of Christendom, making 
the rich richer and the poor poorer, with mammon 
for its god, is the organization of injustices. 

The diplomacy of Christendom is a cunning net- 
work of ambition, treachery, and selfishness. 

The ruling love of Christendom, in and out of its 
churches, is to monopolize wealth and power. 

The cardinal sins of Christendom, in and out of 
its churches, are the three fathers of all sin : self- 
gratification, self-aggrandizement, and self-righteous- 
ness. 

The political tendencies of Christendom are to the 
despotism of moneyed aristocracies on one hand, and 
to the anarchy of a godless commune on the other. 

The churches of Christendom are semi-social, semi- 
political institutions, with more religiosity than re- 
ligion : formal, contentious, inflated ; time-serving, 
power-loving; unable to christianize in any true 



34 THE END OF THE WORLD. 

sense the majority of their members, or to civilize 
the besotted millions at their own doors in our towns 
and cities. Society indeed has reached a point in 
which the salvation of the helpless and brutal classes 
is, under the present regime, totally impossible. 

" There are no more barbarians," says Harris, 
"to overrun the world, but man himself, in the 
very centres of civilization, seems to be reopening 
a savage cycle of life." 

Now this state of things, notwithstanding the 
numerous and encouraging exceptions which might 
be made to every statement, has been singularly and 
steadily progressive for the last fifty years, and 
seems to advance with accelerating speed. In what 
abysses of public and private infamy is it to end ? 
Intellectual progress without religion cannot retard 
the impending catastrophe. The present religions, 
decrepid and effete, cannot stem the tide or reverse 
the current. And yet there is light in the darkness, 
but as is usual in all great crises of the world, the 
darkness comprehends it not. 

The counteracting and compensatory influences 
which have been set to work in the last two or 
three hundred years, entirely independent of the old 
forms of Christianity, which will bring order out 
of chaos, and inaugurate the kingdom of God upon 



THE DEAD CHURCH. 35 

earth, will be fully considered after a while. But 
as the present condition of society is clearly the 
natural and logical effect of the dead state of the 
christian Church, which has been for eighteen hun- 
dred years the spiritual heart of the world, I pro- 
pose to give that complex institution a brief consid- 
eration from the standpoint of the laws of the 
spiritual life. 

What is the Church as it stands before us to-day? 
A vast, wealthy, aggressive, self-assertive, and pow- 
erful institution, having its roots deep in the frame- 
work of society, professing to have the oracles of 
God, and a special mission of protecting, fostering, 
and guiding the religious instincts of the race. Like 
the dragon in the Apocalypse, it has seven heads or 
pretended wisdom, and ten horns of acquired power, 
and in the eyes of the multitude it wears seven 
crowns of heaven-derived authority. 

Such an institution is almost imperishable in an 
external sense, no matter what its internal spiritual 
condition may be. It is stronger than any civil 
government that ever existed. It may have utterly 
corrupted and lost the truth. The special divine 
influences, once its inheritance, may have been with- 
drawn from it. Like the dragon it may have been 
cast out of heaven into the earth; that is, it may 



36 THE END OF THE WORLD. 

have ceased to be a spiritual power, and may have 
become a mere temporal influence, semi-social, semi- 
political, busying itself about spiritual things in the 
most external, earthly, and unspiritual manner. It 
may indeed be spiritually dead; and yet, by its 
material, social, and moral momentum, it may run 
on for hundreds of years, and continue to impose 
itself upon mankind as the original and genuine 
Church of God. 

Let us, therefore, not be deceived or intimidated by 
the imposing external appearance it presents. The 
more imposing that appearance, the grander the 
temples, the more splendid the ritual, the larger the 
salaries, the wealthier the congregations, the more 
dogmatic the priests, the more certain shall we feel 
that the Church has lost the spirit of its Master, has 
misinterpreted the doctrines of the apostles, and is 
unfit to inaugurate upon earth the commune of 
Christ and the divine solidarity of the race. 

The modern Church contains three distinct ele- 
ments : Firstly, a large, outside, non-professing at- 
tendance, respectable people, who have no particular 
faith or interest in spiritual things, who go to church 
because it is the social usage or fashion, and patronize 
the observance of the sabbath as a good thing for 
the public welfare. These persons would perhaps 



THE DEAD CHURCH. 37 

call themselves christians in contradistinction to Jews 
or pagans, but they are simply tinctured or colored 
with Christianity, as insects take the color of the 
trees or plants they inhabit. 

Secondly, the professed members or laity, a vast 
multitude who nine times out of ten inherit their 
religion like their politics, and have never seriously 
examined the evidences of their faith. Their know- 
ledge of theology rarely extends beyond what they 
picked up in the sunday-schools, or have gathered 
from the weekly expositions of their ministers. It 
is therefore one-sided and sectarian, but it generally 
lulls the critical faculties into a deep sleep and they 
are contented. Most of this multitude are held to 
the Church by motives of personal expediency in 
shape of the two strongest passions that animate our 
souls, cupidity and fear: the fear of punishment 
after death, and the wish and hope of a blissful 
hereafter. They therefore resist with instinctive 
and unreasoning antipathy anything which seems 
to militate against their cherished doctrines and 
schemes of salvation. 

Lastly, there is the clergy, a learned, influential, 
and generally estimable class of men, trained to 
walk, think, and feel in very narrow ways, and 
more controlled by precedent, tradition, and author- 

4 



38 THE END OF THE WORLD. 

ity than even the legal profession. As a body they 
are notoriously unprogressive, and many of them 
are the mere disciples of the disciple of a disciple. 
Their indifference to the claims of new spiritual 
truth is proverbial. Most of them are idolaters of 
the Church and its institutions, which loom up be- 
fore them in such a manner as to hide from them a 
true knowledge of the Lord and a true conception 
of the spiritual life. There is no novelty in the 
statement that many of them pursue the clerical 
avocation as a business, with all the shrewdness, 
tact, and ambition of the men of the world. 

When to these considerations is added the fact 
that, by the very nature of the case, they are almost 
irrevocably committed to their creed, and when we 
remember the enormous strength of the material, 
personal, and social interests which still further bind 
them to it, we can realize how much easier it is for 
a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for 
these men, spiritually rich in their own estimation, 
to burst the innumerable wrappages in which they 
are mummified, see the light of the new age, and 
breathe the air of the new heaven. The only hope 
for them is that all things are possible with God. 

When we divide the members of the christian 
Church into three classes, the indifferent, the hypo- 



THE DEAD CHURCH. 39 

crite, and the bigot, we are saved from the despair 
of pessimism by remembering that there is a fourth 
class, a minority in every congregation, on the growth 
and spread of which the religious future of the 
world depends. This class is filled with a noble 
and intense dissatisfaction with the existing state of 
things ; a constant and secret yearning after some- 
thing higher and holier; a divine despair at the 
condition of the Church and the world. They groan 
and rebel in spirit against the institutional forms of 
modern society, which by their strength and com- 
plexity have made the truly regenerate upon earth 
impossible. 

This small but growing class is the iC remnant" so 
frequently mentioned in the Scriptures. The words 
of Isaiah were never more living and true than they 
are to-day : " Except the Lord of hosts had left us 
a very small remnant, we should have been as 
Sodom, and we should have been like unto Gomor- 
rah." The "remnant" of an old dispensation is the 
material out of which the foundations of the new 
are laid. 

The " remnant" in the Jewish Church at the time 
of our Lord was composed of such people as Zach- 
arias and Elizabeth, righteous before God ; the just 
Joseph and his spotless bride ; Simeon, the devout ; 



40 THE END OF THE WORLD. 

Anna, the prophetess, serving God day and night in 
the temple; Nathaniel, the Israelite without guile; 
the good Joseph of Arimathea, waiting for the king- 
dom of God ; and the simple-hearted fishermen who 
" left all," and followed the houseless and homeless 
Jesus. 

A similar " remnant" exists to-day, in and out 
of all the Churches, earnest and sincere souls, full 
of the love of God and the neighbor, whose religion 
manifests itself in the daily walks and labors of life. 
They are the true workers while all the rest are 
drones. The indifferent, the hypocrites, the bigots 
echo their sentiments, appropriate their labors, and 
enjoy the credit of their good works. They are the 
salt of the earth, the light of the world which 
knows them not, the seed of a new Church and a 
new age. 

The vast majority of church members belong to 
the class of indifferents. They give themselves very 
little trouble to examine their creed, or to compare 
it rationally with others. They consider their faith 
as settled and are dead to the spirit of religious in- 
quiry. To be " at ease in Zion" is their heart's de- 
light. They abstain from outbreaking sins ; lead an 
orderly, respectable, moral life ; attend church and 
set generally good examples without appreciating or 



THE DEAD CHURCH. 41 

attempting any very high standard of moral excel- 
lence. Their theology is embodied in the supposed 
vicarious atonement of Christ, salvation by faith 
alone, and the exceeding consolations to be found in 
the late repentance of the thief on the cross. They 
pass through life careless and self-satisfied, having 
no genuine knowledge of themselves or the truth, full 
inwardly, and often unconsciously, of worldliness, 
covetousness, and selfishness, and pass after death 
into the painful, revealing judgments of the spiritual 
world, the melancholy fruitage of a dead Church. 
Most of these people will be no doubt finally saved, 
but it will be as by fire, and by processes of which 
they are at present profoundly ignorant. 

Modern society is wrapped in innumerable veils 
of illusion, and the civilizee is taught from child- 
hood to conceal his opinions and feelings whenever 
his interests demand it. The consequence is, that 
the simulations and dissimulations of life are infi- 
nitely varied, and that the spiritual nature, which 
knows only the yea or nay of genuine truth, is 
greviously suppressed. The god of this world is 
self, and, under his cunning ministrations, marriage, 
friendship, business, and all associations of man with 
man are too often erected upon false and evil foun- 
dations. Every one would have everybody else 

4* 



42 THE END OF THE WORLD. 

think that he is wiser, or richer, or better than he 
really is. Hence the prevalence of sham and fraud. 
Self-love and self-interest parade in every conceiv- 
able disguise, deceiving the very elect. What a 
French writer calls " the undetected population" is 
exceedingly numerous everywhere. 

The Church is a favorite field for such hypocri- 
sies. I allude not only to the flagrant hypocrites, 
the whited. sepulchres, the wolves in sheep's cloth- 
ing, the discovery of whose debaucheries, embezzle- 
ments, and other villainies frequently shock com- 
munities and scandalize the Church. There are the 
less damnable but still grievous hypocrisies of those 
who join the churches from various selfish and un- 
spiritual motives : to enjoy certain social privileges, 
to obtain business advantages, to get into a kind of 
mutual protection and mutual admiration society, 
and maintain a generally respectable appearance be- 
fore the world. The most deeply to be pitied of all 
these hypocrites are those who in deceiving others 
have succeeded in deceiving themselves, and who 
mistake their attendance upon divine worship and 
their well-regulated lives for genuine religion, think- 
ing that whilst bidding for the consideration of their 
neighbors they have secured the approbation of 
God. 



THE DEAD CHURCH. 43 

" Hypocrisy," says a great thinker, " is a parasite 
upon goodness in all its specialities. It is the hypo- 
critical class which forms a nexus between the body 
of the good in the world and the general body of 
the evil. It is the power and pressure of hypocrisy 
which prevents the race from separating into two 
definite classes : those in whom the altruistic loves 
are predominant marching out from the egoistic, and 
even removing to an opposite hemisphere. It is the 
presence of hypocrisy and its dominant power that 
makes both classes, the good and the evil, live in 
false appearances, and that compels mankind to use 
both language and custom as mantles for the con- 
cealment of the real thoughts and intents of the 
heart." 

The state of profanation, the outward profession 
of religion while the internal life is evil, lip service 
while the heart is afar off, is frequently denounced 
with the utmost severity in the sacred writings. Its 
extensive prevalence indicates the last stage of eccle- 
siastical decline, and it is one of the most melancholy 
signs of our own times. We are astonished at the 
fearfully low state of religion in the poor negroes 
of Jamaica and of our southern states, among 
whom the most fervent piety, so far as it can be 
manifested by constant church-going, and prolonged 
singing, shouting, and praying, frequently exists 



44 THE END OF THE WORLD. 

along with stealing, lying, drunkenness, adultery, 
and all uncleanness. 

In truth however, the profanation in the best 
congregations of our own race is less excusable 
on account of the superior light and advantages 
of the guilty ones. Men notoriously disinclined 
to pay their debts, neglectful of their social ob- 
ligations, mean, false, and selfish in their private 
relations, strangers to "the kingdom of heaven 
within," are often prominent in the churches and 
apparently satisfied with their christian status; ready 
to wrangle or even fight for their religion, but 
never able or willing to live it honestly, purely, and 
thoroughly. 

Genuine truth leads us into freedom of will, 
thought, and action. False doctrines make bigots 
of us all, and are begetters of strife, persecution, 
hatred, and self-righteousness. The nearer we are 
to divine truth, the broader and nobler will be our 
views, the humbler and less assertive our characters; 
for we shall be gentle and charitable to all heights 
and depths, no respecters of persons, no devotees of 
creeds or churches. Bigotry knows but one way to 
heaven ; truth admits of a thousand. 

When we see men narrow and sectarian, loud and 
dogmatic in defence of their doctrines, sticklers for 



THE DEAD CHURCH. 45 

the church rather than disciples of Christ; deaf to 
the arguments of others or contemptuously ignoring 
their presentation, reversing the wholesome advice 
of the apostle, to be " swift to hear and slow to 
speak ;" full of antipathies, prejudices, and false 
conceptions of those who oppose them, we may be 
sure that their doctrines are false, for true doctrines 
never produce such fruit, and that they themselves 
are full of spiritual pride and self-righteousness, and 
interiorly akin to the people who crucified Christ, 
and massacred the Huguenots, and burned Servetus 
and Bruno. The liberal forces of the age repress 
into silence and secresy the spirit of intolerance 
which false doctrines invariably beget, but it is only 
smothered, not extinguished. The mediaeval bigot, 
the man of intense convictions, is dying out only 
because the faith of the Church is becoming too 
feeble to perpetuate the character. 

When a man of George McDonald's deep religious 
nature and genuine charity says in general terms 
that the religious newspapers of the day are "tongues 
set on fire of hell," we must presume that he has 
either descended to a depth of vituperation which 
in his case seems impossible, or that he has risen to 
a rare height of spiritual perception, from which he 
has penetrated the thickest disguises of our modern 



46 THE END OF THE WORLD. 

religious life. He stands not alone, however, in his 
opinion. 

" The interests of place and power/' says Grant 
Allen, "of creeds and subscriptions, of political 
parties and social influence have distorted the simple 
search after abstract truth. The odium theologicum 
has passed into a byword of reproach even among 
theologians themselves. Sydney Smith was a canon 
of St. Paul's, but no man has more graphically 
pointed out the virulence and unconscientiousness 
of religious polemics. To misrepresent an antag- 
onist, to pervert his language, to garble his state- 
ments, nay, even to credit him with opinions which 
he constantly and expressly disclaims, and all ad 
majoram Dei gloriam, are still, it would seem, pious 
frauds highly gratifying to the pure and supreme 
power of official theology." 

We must not be deceived when it is cited as a 
hopeful sign of the times and of renewed life in the 
churches that our modern sermons are losing the 
old doctrinal cast, and are full of beautiful and 
saintly things addressed to the practical life of the 
hearer. It is all illusive. When a Church is dead, 
the pulpit is powerless, preach as it may. The same 
beautiful and saintly things are to be found in Bud- 
dha, and Confucius, and the proverbs of Solomon, 
and in Cicero, Seneca, and the christian fathers. 



THE BEAD CHURCH. 47 

The man who utters them never lives up to the 
grand ideal he presents to others. His own family- 
is sometimes the exact reverse of his magnificent 
model. The people who hear and applaud him go 
on as before, without changing their motives or their 
habits, the good seed having fallen by the wayside, 
or upon the rocks, or among thorns and briers. 

Alas ! how much christian charity is ostentatious 
or imitative; how much suavity and kindness are 
interested or conventional ; how much honesty is 
mere policy ; how many virtues are cloaks for the 
concealment of the opposite vices; how much sel- 
fishness is found in self-sacrifice ; how much pride 
in humility ; how much ambition or covetousness in 
the apparent consecration of one's life to others ! 

How can the world, drawing its life from the 
Church, be other than it is, when such is the actual 
state of the Church ? But let us penetrate nearer to 
the source whence all these dark and bitter waters 
flow. That source is the family circle. The Church 
may be ignorant of the organic spiritual connection 
between itself and the world, for that is a matter of 
recent revelation ; but it cannot be ignorant of its 
responsibility for the state of the family in its own 
bosom. Its commission is to feed the sheep and the 
lambs. They will grow and flourish, or be stunted 



48 THE END OF THE WORLD. 

and die, according to the nature of the spiritual food 
which is given them. Has the Church nourished 
them with the bread of heaven, the divine truths 
which fell from the lips of Jesus Christ? The facts 
must answer. The opinions of the laity, the assev- 
erations of the clergy are not admissible evidence. 
What is the state of the family after the guidance 
and tuition of the christian Church for eighteen 
centuries ? 

The state of the family depends upon the spir- 
itual conditions of marriage, and the spiritual lives 
of the husband and wife. In the depths of the 
home are the fountains of religion, the springs of 
duty, the open windows of heaven, whence flow the 
streams of love and truth, and faith and charity, and 
honesty and nobleness, and all the graces and virtues. 
Pure, faithful, and unselfish partners make loving, 
just, wise, watchful, and self-sacrificing parents, and 
these beget children like themselves, and regard it 
as the supreme act of divine worship to train these 
little ones in the paths of the heavenly life. Here 
is the Church's opportunity; here its authority is 
highest, its influence greatest. What has it done? 

What do we see ? That religion has little more 
to do with marriage than to perform the ceremony, 
and that in the eye of the law it is only a civil con- 



THE DEAD CHURCH, 49 

tract. How seldom do spiritual motives, spiritual 
affinities, spiritual insight into character, spiritual 
aspirations and consecrations dominate in the choice 
of conjugial partners ! What worldliness, yea, earth- 
liness, what cold, calculating ambitions, what mere 
magnetic fascinations, what selfishness, what sensu- 
alities masquerading in the holy name of love, re- 
ceive the benedictions of the Church ! 

What is the result? The absence of all divine 
influxes into the holy of holies of human life; the 
profanation of that sacred temple where only heaven 
and earth can fully meet ; the confirmation of both 
parties in hereditary evils and in unchristian lives; 
the propagation of a diseased and degenerate race ; 
spiritual alienations, desecrated shrines, false lives; 
the hidden hungers of the soul, and all the bondage, 
cruelty, subterfuge, infidelity, and misery which we 
witness in the married relation to-day ! For all this, 
after fifteen centuries of supreme power, the Church 
is responsible. 

From such parents, what children? Oftentimes 
unwelcome visitors, hated and persecuted before 
birth ; neglected afterwards through ignorance or 
laziness or selfishness, left as much as possible to 
servants and subordinates, what can we expect? See 
what little savages, what early development of evil 
c d 5 



50 THE END OF THE WORLD. 

and vicious propensities; what cruelties to insects 
and small animals, what meanness and perfidy to 
each other; what bickerings, fightings, lying, envy- 
ings, vanity, pride, greediness; often uncorrected, 
unreproved, sometimes even encouraged by parents ! 
Injudiciously petted and injudiciously beaten, mal- 
trained, maltreated, they become prodigies of deceit 
and dissimulation. Unwatched, uninstructed, driven 
too early to school or to low associates to be got out 
of the way, they fall into revolting habits that poison 
the primal springs of life. What follows? Diso- 
bedience, headstrong passions, outrageous tempers, dis- 
respect of parents, blasphemies, quarrels and hatreds 
of each other, false views of life, base motives, low 
ambitions, concealments, hypocrisies, selfishness, and 
utter worldliness; and so on, to manhood and woman- 
hood, to make husbands and wives like their parents 
and to beget progeny like themselves. And for all 
this, after eighteen centuries of instruction, the 
Church is responsible. 

From such integral elements, what kind of families 
and family life may we expect ? Hotbeds of pride, 
arrogance, selfishness, and all sorts of meannesses 
and follies, faintly concealed under the assumed 
suavities and proprieties of modern life : the members 
envious, jealous, quarrelsome among themselves, pre- 



THE DEAD CHURCH. 51 

tentious and hypocritical to others; hard, exacting, 
and contemptuous to their servants, to the poor, and 
to all whom they employ; what spots in their feasts! 
what skeletons in their closets! tattlers, busybodies, 
mischief-makers; worshippers of fashion, position, 
and money; and, if conscience ever raises a feeble 
remonstrance, full of ready and self-satisfying excuses 
for their unchristian feelings and conduct. Such fam- 
ilies abound in all the churches, their true character 
being well known to everybody but themselves; and 
they go on from generation to generation, confirmed 
in all hereditary evil, and still professing the religion 
of Christ. And for all this, after eighteen centuries 
of pastorship, the christian Church is responsible. 

The average church member will regard these 
pictures of a dead Church with surprise and incred- 
ulity, because he is the victim of a foregone but false 
conclusion that the christian Church, by successive 
stages of development, has arrived at the zenith of 
wisdom and virtue, having nothing to surrender and 
nothing more to acquire. He will probably be 
grieved or insulted when a genuine portrait of his 
Church, drawn by an inspired artist of the first cen- 
tury, is held before his eyes. It is metaphorically 
addressed to the Church of the Laodiceans : it is a 
photograph of the Christianity of our own times. 



52 THE END OF 'THE WORLD. 

" Because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, 
I will spue thee out of my- mouth. 

" Because thou say est, lam rich and increased with 
goods, and have need of nothing ; and hnowest not that 
thou art wretched and miserable, and poor, and blind, 
and naked ; 

" I counsel thee to buy of me gold tried in the fire, that 
thou may est be rich ; and white raiment that thou may est be 
clothed, and that the shame of thy nakedness do not appear; 
and anoint thine eyes with eye-salve that thou may est see. 11 

There is still unquestionably a vast amount of 
goodness, virtue, honesty, noble aspiration, self-sac- 
rifice among men, but they seem to have no necessary 
or organic connection with the christian religion. 
The Church in the utmost stretch of its self-right- 
eousness can lay no just claims to a monopoly of the 
brotherly love and disinterested benevolence of the 
world. The secularization of charity and morals is 
quite as conspicuous a feature of the age as the eclipse 
of faith. Creeds and systems, on careful analysis, 
will be found to have ceased to exercise any genuine 
spiritual power over the thoughts, affections, and 
daily conduct of men. The Church has ceased to 
be the Church of God. It is dead ! 

For where in the whole christian world, after 
eighteen hundred years of missionary and pastoral 



THE DEAD CHURCH. 53 

work, is there a single family, or society, or church, 
great or small, whose members are united in those 
perfect bonds of affection, thought, and action, or 
anything resembling them, which Christ was con- 
templating when He prayed that His disciples should 
be made one with each other and with Him, even 
as He was one with the Father ? 

What is the reason of all this? Room for the 
truth ! It is because the Church has perverted and 
falsified the fundamental truths of the gospel of 
Christ. How and to what extent will be explained 
in subsequent chapters. It does not feed its flock 
upon the spiritual food of the Word of God, but 
upon the husks of the letter. It reels and staggers 
like a drunken man ; " drunk, but not with wine ;" 
drunk with the strong liquor of false doctrine, the 
secret cause of all forms of drunkenness. It has 
ceased to be the bride of the Lamb. There is no 
holy marriage of the Good and the True in its teach- 
ings or its life. The Good refuses to be married to 
the False. It w r ould violate the laws of the spiritual 
life, and falsify the logic of the universe, if the 
present corrupt system taught as Christianity could 
bring about any serious or permanent amendment 
in the marriage relation, in the family, in the 
Church, or in the world. 

5* 



CHAPTER III. 

THE DEAD CHUKCHES. 

TF there be a dead Church, there must have been 
■*" dead Churches : a fact of vast importance, very- 
little known, but constituting the corner-stone of the 
philosophy of history. All the physical, social, and 
historical phenomena of the world are the products, 
outbirths, or projections of the spiritual life of man ; 
and it ought to be clear to every rational mind that 
divine revelations and the spiritual government of 
God did not begin in the time of Abraham, when 
splendid civilizations had already existed in Asia 
and Egypt for thousands of years. 

No theological system is of any value which does 
not embrace the whole of mankind, which does not 
explain history, and connect the past with the pres- 
ent and the future in bonds of mutual relationship. 
It must transcend the limits of Judea ; it must re- 
cognize the divine element in all ages and countries ; 
it must proclaim boldly that if revelation be possible 

at all, it existed from the beginning, and will con- 
54 



THE DEAD CHURCHES. 55 

tinue to be made according to the evolutionary and 
developmental exigencies of the race. The true re- 
ligion must recognize, combine, harmonize, and ex- 
plain all phenomena. 

Every religion, every Church regards itself as a 
finality. Hence bigotry, intolerance, and the closure 
of the mind to any reconsideration of old questions, 
and to any proper consideration of new ones. One 
of the most elevating and liberalizing thoughts the 
modern christian needs, is a recognition of the fact 
that there has been a series of Churches or dispensa- 
tions, and that the internal or spiritual truths of all 
the Churches, concealed under a vast variety of ex- 
ternal appearances, have been always essentially the 

same. 

Under certain conditions a Church is established 
or born; it grows and flourishes for a definite period, 
and then, under certain conditions, it declines, withers, 
and dies. This great event, the birth, life, and 
death of a Church, has now occurred four times in 
this world, constituting four discrete steps or degrees 
in the religious life of humanity. So true is it that 
a Church of God with its accompanying revelation 
is the medium of conjunction between heaven and 
earth, that when we see the most unequivocal signs 
of ecclesiastical stagnation and death, we may be 



56 THE END OF THE WORLD. 

sure that a new Church has been born, and we may 
look eagerly around into some clump of bulrushes, 
or some field where the sheep are feeding, or into 
some manger for the new leader, the new king, the 
new revelation of Christ. 

How strange it is that sincere christians can see 
and bewail the present coldness of the Church, the 
lifelessness of religion, the powerlessness of its 
teachings; how many are unconverted, how many 
backslide, how many professors are faithless or in- 
different ; how many children carefully and prayer- 
fully trained in their doctrines become vagabonds 
and castaways; and yet search for the causes of these 
things in any but the right direction ; explore roof 
and turret and tower, but never think of re-exam- 
ining the foundations of their faith, not remembering 
the words of the psalmist, "If the foundations be 
destroyed, what can the righteous do ?" 

Churches commit suicide; they never perish by 
the hands of others. The gates of hell could never 
prevail against the divine truths upon which all the 
four great Churches of God have been founded. 
The Church has always destroyed its own founda- 
tions by evils of life which led to perversions of 
doctrine. When the builders reject and cast out the 
corner-stone, the edifice loses its equilibrium and 



THE DEAD CHURCHES. 57 

gradually tumbles and disintegrates into a ruin. It 
will be shown in this volume that the apostolic or 
first christian Church is dead, because it has lost or 
totally corrupted the fundamental truths relating to 
the character and mission of Jesus Christ. 

A dead Church is one to which the living oracles 
or revelations from God were committed, but which 
has misunderstood, corrupted, and disobeyed them, 
until it has ceased to be the centre of divine influxes 
and the true source of spiritual illumination, and 
becomes incapable of promoting the regeneration of 
the individual or the evangelization of the world. 

A dead Church never knows it is dead, for after 
the soul has left it, its clergy struggle with desperate 
energy to save the machine, and to galvanize it into 
vitality. It may exhibit an immense external activ- 
ity, render itself exceedingly useful in a social and 
educational way, and produce members who are prod- 
igies of learning and piety; and yet from a spir- 
itual stand-point it may be a defunct institution, 
whose presence is a vast obstruction to the descent 
of the true light and life of heaven. 

u I know thy works, that thou hast a name that thou 
It vest, and art deadr 

When we thus understand the meaning of a dead 



58 THE END OF THE WORLD. 

Church, we can clearly perceive that the world is 
full of the wrecks or debris of the dead Churches 
of the past. Man cannot rise above nature by the 
light of nature. All spiritual truth has been com- 
municated from above. The innumerable false doc- 
trines in the world are corruptions and falsifications 
of truths originally derived from heaven. Man has 
never invented a religion : his work is corruption 
and negation. Every false species of worship, from 
sun-worship to snake- worship, from fetichism to 
deism, is an organic remnant, corrupted perhaps be- 
yond recognition, of some system of divine truth, 
exactly adapted at the time of its revelation to the 
spiritual conditions of the race. Therefore the mo- 
ralities, virtues, and semi-civilizations, found in 
what we call heathen countries, such as India, 
Japan, and the interior of Africa, are remnants or 
vestiges of the religious life of perished dispensa- 
tions. 

History is religion as well as philosophy teach- 
ing by example, and to bring its light to bear 
upon the experiences of the present age and the 
future of the race, let us take a bird's eye view of 
what may be called the universal ecclesiastical his- 
tory of man. We see in it four immense, well- 
marked divisions and the beginning of a fifth, each 



THE DEAD CHURCHES. 59 

one differing greatly in outward appearance from the 
others. These indicate five distinct and successive 
revelations which have been made to mankind, five 
distinct acts in the continuous drama of the religious 
life. There is an antediluvian dispensation ; a post- 
diluvian, thousands of years anterior to Abraham ; 
the Mosaic dispensation ; the apostolic or first Chris- 
tian dispensation ; and lastly that great and new 
light from the spiritual sense of the Word of God, 
a few truths of which will be unfolded in this little 
volume. 

The antediluvian Church was the spiritual para- 
dise in which the race was cradled : the golden age 
of tradition, when heaven was open to men, who at 
first led angelic lives and were truly images and 
likenesses of God. Its history contains that inscrut- 
able secret, the origin of evil. It left no records to 
tell us where it was situated, how long it lasted, or 
what were its doctrines and its ritual. It differed 
exceedingly from every thing the world has seen 
ever since its destruction. Its life was intuitive, 
descending from spiritual to natural, and not like 
ours, apparently ascending from natural to spiritual. 
Its knowledge sprang from its affections and not 
from the reports of the senses. When its affections 
were good, the intellect was in corresponding light; 



60 TH E END OF THE WORLD. 

when the affections became evil, the understanding 
was utterly darkened. 

Great indeed w T as the fall of this Church, which 
was typified in the myths of antiquity as a fall of 
angels out of heaven. The greater the heights of 
its holiness, the deeper must have been the depths 
of its declension. 

" And Ged saw that the wickedness of man was great 
in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts 
of his heart was only evil continually ." Gen. vi. 5. 

The antediluvian race, having become evil and 
having thereby falsified the truths it received from 
heaven, experienced a terrible judgment, which is 
represented to us under the symbol of a flood, which 
destroyed the old order of things, closed their com- 
munication with heaven, and suffocated or extin- 
guished their spiritual life, reducing their under- 
standings to utter darkness and their affections to an 
animal or bestial state. The true primeval man can 
never be discovered by the geologist and scientist. 
The aborigines or original savages of every country 
are the degraded and brutalized remnant of the pre- 
historic form of human life. 

It is at this low state of intellectual and moral 
vitality that the scientists of the present day take 
up the study of man. They mistake for our veri- 



THE DEAD CHURCHES. 61 

table beginnings what is the last and effete product 
of a long decline. Their theories of evolution and 
the genesis of the moral faculties applied to the 
advance of man from the savage to the civilized 
state are mainly true. They are ignorant however 
of the causes of the development. It is not spon- 
taneous or self-originated. It is the revivification 
of the small remnant of the rational faculty left to 
them after the great spiritual catastrophe of the 
flood, and which has been transmitted by the laws 
of heredity from generation to generation. That 
remnant is like the seeds in the mummy, buried for 
ages but not dead, ready to sprout again into forms 
of beauty at the magic touch of the sun. 

Evolution and involution are correlative. Noth- 
ing can be evolved which was not previously in- 
volved. The tree is involved in the seed, the chick 
is involved in the egg, the civilizee is involved in the 
barbarian. Evolution is simply the efflorescence or 
outward manifestation, according to certain laws of 
development, of forces and forms which had been 
interiorly concealed. Man was clearly never in- 
volved in the animal tribes nearest to him, apes, 
ouran-outangs, gorillas, and monkeys, for they have 
never manifested the least disposition or capacity to 
develop upwards towards him. It is a thousand 



62 THE END OF THE WOULD. 

times more probable that these strange creatures are 
melancholy degenerations of the human type, wrecks 
of the primal race, de-spiritualized men, sunk forever 
below the reach of the rational and immortal life 
which descends from heaven, visible monuments of 
what we would all have become but for the great 
redemptive work of the Lord Jesus Christ. 

The first postdiluvian Church was instituted in 
Central Asia, and was the prolific mother of all the 
oriental and ancient religions. It began with a small 
and salvable " remnant" from the preceding dispen- 
sation, and it expressed in symbolic and correspon- 
dential forms the spiritual mysteries with which the 
primeval men were innately familiar. This Church 
had a Bible or Sacred Word, revealed by inspiration 
from heaven, and written entirely in the language 
of signatures or correspondences. Parts of this Di- 
vine Word were the Book of Jashur, the Book of 
the Wars of Jehovah, the Book of the Enunciations, 
and that allegorical book from which the first ten 
and a half chapters of Genesis were extracted by 
the writer of the pentateuch, as a suitable preface to 
our present Word. A remnant or fragment of the 
old is always thus builded into the new. These writ- 
ings and the key to them will be yet recovered from 
the long lost and buried treasures of the old world. 



THE DEAD CHURCHES. 63 

Some genuine remnants of that Church were still 
lingering upon the earth at the beginning of the 
Hebrew dispensation, as is seen in Melchisedek " the 
priest of the most high God," who accepted tithes 
from Abraham and administered to him the bread 
and wine of a most ancient holy supper. The per- 
versions and corruptions of that Church are em- 
bodied in the innumerable myths, idolatries, and 
mythologies of Egypt, India, Persia, Greece, and 
Rome. The startling resemblance, captiously no- 
ticed by infidels, which some of these oriental alle- 
gories bear to the truths of Christianity, is clearly 
accounted for by the fact that the great and lost 
mother-truths from which these degraded children 
sprung, are perfectly identical with the spiritual 
mysteries concealed beneath the veils of the Old and 
New Testaments, thus proving the organic solidarity 
of the whole body of genuine truth from the first 
ages to the present. 

When that Church of the silver age was rapidly 
dying out into idolatry, magic, and the sensualism 
of Sodom and Gomorrah, it passed into that judg- 
ment which is always the result of violated laws, 
and we see its results in the extinct civilizations, the 
dead languages, the lost sciences of ancient Egypt, 
and its mother Asia. God then established a repre- 



64 THE END OF THE WORLD. 

sentative Church among a peculiar people prepared 
for that special mission. The external history of 
that race was so ordered by divine providence, that 
the details of it embodied symbolically all the truths 
better known to the more ancient Churches, but 
utterly concealed under a multitude of types and 
shadows from the knowledge or comprehension of 
the obstinate and sensual people, who were the auto- 
matic instruments of a revelation of the Divine 
Word, the divinity of which was unapparent in the 
letter. 

The divine influxes then centred. for many cen- 
turies in the Mosaic laws and ritual, the outward 
history and the prophetic inspirations of the Jews. 
Judea became the concealed spiritual heart of the 
world, whence the life of God circulated invisibly 
to all the nations. The divine truths contained in 
the Old Testament can never be discovered by the 
most exhaustive study of the letter, but open their 
inestimable treasures on the application of the key 
of correspondences. 

The Jewish Church also experienced the necessary 
fate of an imperfect revelation ; it grew, flourished, 
declined, and perished to make way for a better. It 
corrupted its doctrines, maltreated its prophets, cru- 
cified its Messiah. It was visited by a terrible judg- 



THE BEAD CHURCHES. 65 

ment. Its sacrificial system was abolished, its temple 
destroyed, its city and nation overwhelmed, and its 
people scattered to the four quarters of the globe. 
That Church has resisted in the most extraordinary 
manner the disintegrating influences of time and 
persecution, presenting to-day an imposing front of 
intelligence, wealth, and power. It forcibly illus- 
trates the fact, that a dead Church may seem to live 
for centuries after it has ceased to be the centre of 
spiritual life to the world. 

I have called the fourth dispensation the apostolic, 
because though nominally Christian, this Church 
failed almost from the beginning to comprehend the 
true character and mission of Christ, and has neither 
taught nor lived the life of fraternal solidarity which 
Christ desired to inaugurate among men. It was 
cradled in dissensions; it was corrupted by heresies, 
intestinal turmoils, and temporal ambitions; and 
when it joined political power to sacerdotal authority, 
it ran a long and disgraceful career of usurpation, 
persecution, and bloodshed. 

Notwithstanding the very great services which 
this Church has rendered in the civilization of 
Europe, its historical record is perhaps worse in the 
light of heaven than that of any religious system 
which has ever existed. The sacrifices to Moloch, 



66 THE END OF THE WORLD. 

Mars, and Juggernaut never equalled in extent or 
atrocity the devilish cruelties practised systematically, 
and for ages, by one school of Christians upon another 
school of a little different shade of opinion. It is 
strange to see religionists, professing the heavenly 
doctrines of brotherhood and peace, sentence all un- 
believers to hell, while displaying more ambition, 
covetousness, and cruelty than any heathen nation 
has ever exhibited. 

" The Church of Rome/' says Leckey, u has shed 
more innocent blood than any other institution that 
has ever existed among mankind." In Spain alone 
thirty-one thousand human beings were burned at 
the stake. In Netherlands fifty thousand people 
were cruelly butchered for their religious opinions 
during the reign of Charles V., and twenty-five 
thousand during the reign of his son. Europe has 
been saturated with blood, and the human heart sub- 
jected to agonies unspeakable by the ministers of 
Christ endeavoring to force upon mankind their mis- 
erable perversions of the doctrines of Christ. In a 
paroxysm of religious insanity the Inquisition once 
condemned all the inhabitants of the Netherlands to 
death ! three millions of people, men, women, and 
children ; and the king ordered the decree to be car- 
ried into instant execution ! But for the impossibility 



THE DEAD CHURCHES. 67 

of executing their murderous intentions, the mediae- 
val christians would have exterminated the whole 
human race outside of their own doctrinal pale. 

The reactionary protest of the human mind against 
the insane ambitions, follies, corruptions, tyrannies, 
cruelties, and robberies of this apostolic Church, gave 
rise to a number of discordant sects on one hand, 
and to the development of the infidel and rational- 
istic spirit on the other. The result has been the 
eclipse of faith, the secularization of charity, the 
reign of cupidity and hypocrisy, the triumph of 
naturalism, and the utter spiritual desolation of 
our own times, in which those who can read the 
signs aright perceive the consummation of another 
age and the death of another Church. 

" Let it perish," exclaimed a brave and gifted spirit, 
" its leaders have been blind leaders of the blind, 
who have crucified every noble soul who would have 
opened their sealed eyes with spiritual spittle." 

Notwithstanding the innumerable instances of 
individual righteousness, it is impossible to study 
the ecclesiastical history of Europe from the New 
Testament stand-point, and to believe that the apos- 
tolic Church as a bo ly was ever possessed of the 
spirit of Christ, or truly represented the kingdom 
of heaven in the soul of man. It is totally impos- 



68 THE END OF THE WORLD. 

sible to believe that the Comforter, the spirit of truth, 
led into all truth the benighted souls of those dark 
and terrible centuries. It is vain to tell us that 
Christ founded a Church, and promised to be with 
it to the end of the world. In one sense Christ is 
always with us, individually and collectively, to the 
end of our appointed careers. In another sense He 
is with us upon conditions which are always open to 
us. When we do not comply with His conditions, 
we withdraw ourselves from Him, not He from us, 
and so lose the celestial light of His presence. The 
facts of history show us very plainly that the Church 
abandoned Christ and His doctrines at an early period, 
and so sank into a state of spiritual decline, which 
has terminated by the universal law in a state of 
spiritual death. 

The fifth dispensation which has now begun and 
is rapidly progressing, bringing with it the inevitable 
judgment upon the one which preceded it, can only 
be comprehended after we have mastered, in subse- 
quent chapters, the meaning of the prophetic sym- 
bols, the end of the world, the coming of Christ, 
the resurrection of the dead, the new heaven and 
the new earth, the New Jerusalem descending from 
God, etc., by which it is described and predicted in 
the sacred Scriptures. 



THE DEAD CHURCHES. 69 

In this connection the spiritual sense of Nebu- 
chadnezzar's vision is very beautiful and instructive, 
rising far above Daniel's historical interpretation 
and all the little lights and shadows of the Jewish 
state. 

The golden head of the image represented the 
antediluvian Church with its spiritual Eden and its 
age of gold. 

The silver breast and arms was the postdiluvian 
Church with its vast ramifications, and its science 
of correspondences full of spiritual truth and power. 

The belly and thighs of brass represented the 
grossly natural Jewish dispensation, with all the 
spirit of its contemporaneous history, Egyptian, As- 
syrian, Grecian, and Roman. 

The feet and legs of iron was the first Christian 
or apostolic Church with its immense material power 
and its scientific literalism. 

The feet and toes being part iron and part clay 
signifies our own present closing, mixed, and transi- 
tional state, in which scientism and sensualism pre- 
vail in antagonism to all religious ideas. 

These things also represent the morning, noon, 
evening, and night ; the spring, summer, autumn, 
and winter ; the childhood, youth, manhood, and 
old age of the religious life of man. 



70 THE END OF THE WORLD. 

The final state of the historic natural man of this 
earth is now attained. The consummation is reached. 
A great change is impending, which will produce 
such a radical revolution in both man and nature 
that a totally new order of life will begin, subject to 
spiritual rather than to what we now call natural 
laws. This is predicted in the vision. A great 
stone is seen to smite the metallic image so as to 
grind it into powder, which is carried away by the 
winds. This stone is called " the mountain of the 
Lord," and subsequently u the Kingdom of God," 
which shall endure forever and fill the whole earth. 
The utter destruction of the present ecclesiastical and 
institutional life of man will be followed by the 
establishment of the New Jerusalem which descends 
from God out of heaven, and is the commune of 
Christ upon earth. 

Looking back and all around at the debris of the 
dead churches with which the world is encumbered, 
each still performing some use which preserves it 
from extinction, we may feel certain that there are 
secret bonds of connection between them all; that 
they are parts of some stupendous whole, broken and 
apparently unconnected fragments, reflecting and re- 
fracting from their infinitude of surfaces the same 
images of one God, one Word of God, one universal 



THE DEAD CHURCHES. 71 

Church, one catholic religion, all centring in that 
Divine Man, who was before all things and by 
whom all things consist, and who is the alpha and 
the omega, the first and the last, the beginning and 
the end. 

It is a mistake to suppose that human nature has 
always manifested itself in the same manner. There 
are three human natures, or rather three degrees of 
human nature, the celestial, the spiritual, the natural. 
They look from different stand-points, are actuated 
by different motives and lead to different results. 
The celestial is dominated by his affections, the 
spiritual by his conceptions of truth, the natural 
by his external or objective and sensuous relations. 
The antediluvian Church was celestial. It saw God 
by intuition because it was pure in heart. The post- 
diluvian Church was spiritual. It did not see God 
with the heart but with the mind, reflected in all the 
glories and splendors of His creation. Therefore it 
recognized all external things as symbols of internal 
and spiritual things, and all its institutions and liter- 
ature were symbolical. It was incapable of saying 
or seeing things in a literal manner as we do. The 
Jewish era was entirely natural, or governed by the 
senses. That Church saw God only through external 
relations and was governed by strict regulations and 



72 THE END OF THE WORLD. 

rituals, a system of rewards and punishments, and 
by low and grovelling measures and motives, utterly 
unknown to the preceding and better dispensations. 

It is another mistake to suppose that the fall of 
man was completed by the expulsion from the garden 
of Eden. That was only the beginning of the fall. 
He was really falling all the way from Adam to 
Christ. He fell from a celestial to a spiritual state, 
and from that into a natural state, and from that he 
would have sunk downwards into a bestial state, and 
lost both reason and immortality, but for the incarna- 
tion of Jehovah, who bowed the heavens and came 
down, to animate an infirm human nature, and to 
sanctify and glorify it, so that it would be a per- 
petual Mediator, the centre of life, power, and salva- 
tion to the race. 

The incarnation was no sudden phenomenon. God 
descended along with man all the time he was fall- 
ing from his highest to his lowest state, accommo- 
dating Himself with infinite wisdom and mercy to 
every successive degree of being, revealing Himself 
to him in different forms, written and institutional, 
until when man reached the lowest round of the 
ladder of life, God also appeared upon that round 
as a Man, a brother, a teacher, and a Savior. 

The incarnation is the central, pivotal fact of his- 



THE DEAD CHURCHES. 73 

tory — the fact which explains all others — the fact to 
which all antecedent and subsequent facts are logi- 
cally related. He who understands the incarnation 
has the key to the philosophy of the universe. In 
what utter darkness are those philosophizers, not 
philosophers, who dispute, deny, or misinterpret that 
transcendent phenomenon ! 

Since the incarnation of the Everlasting Father 
in the form of the man Jesus Christ the secret or- 
ganic movement of the race has been reversed, and 
tends upward to the unfolding again of its latent 
spiritual and celestial capacities. The apostolic 
Church has not been able to deliver itself from the 
literalism of the Jewish dispensation, but that which 
is now impending will be the consummate flower of 
all the ages, foreseen and provided for from the be- 
ginning, which will gather up all the lost threads of 
life into its hand, retaining every genuine literal 
truth, unfolding the spiritual meanings contained 
in all the symbolisms of the Word, of history and of 
nature, and re-opening the sealed fountains of the 
soul, whence the celestial life of angels shall flow 
forth to regenerate and glorify the world. 

Comte, the great founder of the positive school 
with its embryonic religion of humanity, teaches 
that the development of the human race proceeds by 



74 THE END OF THE WORLD. 

three successive stages. The first stage is theological 
or mystical ; the second is metaphysical or critical ; 
the third is scientific or positive. He thinks man is 
in his feeblest state at first, the victim of illusions, 
the slave of his own imaginations, the creator of his 
religions. After a while he begins to exercise his 
rational faculties, to 'analyze and compare, to doubt 
his conclusions, and to break his idols. Passing on- 
ward and upward as M. Comte fondly supposes, we 
finally reach, by observation and experiment, a stage 
of positive, scientific thought, from which every 
trace of revealed religion has been carefully elimi- 
nated. 

Such has been exactly the career of all the dead 
Churches, but the movement of the three stages is 
not one of progress but of degradation and decline. 
The theological or mystical period of a Church is 
one of revelation, of open vision, of perfect faith and 
charity, of genuine religion. Then succeeds a stage 
when the Church is divided in opinion, analyzing, 
speculating, doubting, trusting more and more dog- 
matically to its own intelligence in proportion as it 
recedes from the light of God. This is the period 
of philosophies and sects and systems. Descending 
lower through various rounds of skepticism it per- 
ishes at last in the depths of scientism and sensual- 



THE DEAD CHURCHES. 75 

ism, having closed all avenues to the divine ap- 
proaches except the five gateways of the senses 
which we share with every beast of the field. 

It seems that the spiritual light and power com- 
municated at the beginning of a dispensation become 
transmuted as it moves along into all the various 
mental forces which produce the intellectual, civil, 
scientific, and industrial life of man. When these 
last attain their greatest height, that influx from God 
which we call the religious life is at its lowest point, 
and a new revelation is necessary to give a higher 
spiritual vitality, a broader intellectual culture, and 
to carry the race onward to still higher scientific and 
material stand-points. Between the end of one dis- 
pensation and the rise of another there is always an 
evil period, a moral interregnum, such as we are now 
beginning to experience. 

This change of the spiritual life, which flows into 
the whole race, consciously or unconsciously, with 
every new dispensation, into intellectual activities, 
and finally into all the lower forms of human energy, 
is illustrated by the transmutability of the physical 
forces. The heat and light of the sun go forth on 
their beneficent errands, but soon cease to exist as 
heat and light, having been transmuted into elec- 
tricity, magnetism, chemical affinities, and molecular 



76 THE END OF THE WORLD. 

and mechanical motions. The transmutation goes 
on into mineral and vegetable substances, until the 
philosophers say truly that the heat and light of the 
sun are involved or buried in the coal mines of the 
earth. So the life of God is transmuted into all 
finite affections and thoughts, and these again into 
religion, poetry, music, art, science, philosophy, and 
all the external manifestations of human life. 

The rise and decline of these four different dispen- 
sations indicate no change in the divine will, or 
any failure in the plan of God for the develop- 
ment and final perfection of His children. Had 
man lived in absolute obedience and order, the same 
course of descent on the spiritual side and of ascent 
on the natural side would no doubt have occurred. 
The celestial or intuitive stage would have been fol- 
lowed by the spiritual or correspondential stage, and 
that by the rational and scientific stage, which would 
have rested finally on a fixed and perfect literal, 
material, and sensuous basis. It takes all of these 
stages to make the perfect man. It took them all 
to develop humanity to its present stand-point, and 
the re-opening of the spiritual and the celestial de- 
grees are still necessary to unite it with God in a 
beautiful and perpetual spiritual life. 

Amid all the evils of the world, and all its real 



THE DEAD CHURCHES. 77 

and apparent decline, there has been a secret, steady 
progressive ascent in one most important respect. 
Each succeeding revelation has been externally fuller 
and more perfect than the last, and every dispensa- 
tion on perishing has left the race in possession of 
social institutions, arts, sciences, and material com- 
forts for the masses never attained before. Each 
new dispensation is the evolution, unfolding or flow- 
ering out of " the remnant" or the best and fittest 
surviving parts of the old. Each is a great prepa- 
ration for something beyond, and all together make 
a graduated series of changes, comparable to those 
great natural developments of the mineral, vegetable, 
and animal kingdoms which prepared our physical 
globe as the habitation of man. The landing place 
at last attained is so rich in beneficent results, in the 
developments of science, the conquests over nature, 
the perfection of social forms, the principles of lib- 
erty, equality, fraternity, that it will soon be fitted 
to serve as a permanent natural basis, for the erection 
upon it of that perfect and final Church, the New 
Jerusalem, which is descending from heaven. 

The coming religion will be the synthesis of all 
religions and of humanity; bringing a theology 
which shall open the Divine Word and reveal the 
revelation connecting God with man and man with 

7* 



78 THE END 0F THE WORLD. 

God : a philosophy which explains spirit and matter, 
solves the problems of history; and embraces the 
truths of rationalism and science, and a practical life 
which shall w T ork out the redemption of society and 
the brotherhood of the race. 

We are about to enter upon our inheritance as the 
rightful heirs of all the ages. We have the key to 
the symbolisms of the Word and of nature, the 
written and the unwritten revelations of God. We 
shall gather up the fragments that nothing be lost, 
celestial, spiritual, rational, natural, scientific, sen- 
suous. They are all ours and we will reconstruct 
them into a perfect whole. The world approaches 
that end which was in the beginning. The cherubim 
who have guarded the gates of Eden now lower their 
flaming swords, in token that man may enter. He 
will return into the state in which he w T as first cre- 
ated, with the additional advantages that he will add 
the matured wisdom of manhood to the innocence of 
the child, and will have achieved, by manifold ex- 
periences, sometimes painful but always instructive, 
such a conquest over himself and over nature, and 
such a union with God, that heaven and earth will 
be chambers opening into each other, and no decline 
of the divine life in the soul will ever again be pos- 
sible. 



THE DEAD CHURCHES. 79 

One of the greatest obstacles to this glorious de- 
nouement is that gigantic organization which dis- 
plays the symbol of the Cross, but neither teaches 
the doctrines nor realizes the life of the Crucified. 



CHAPTER IV. 

PKOOFS FKOM THE WOED. 

TTAVING verified the fact that the apostolic 
^"^ Church is dead, and that its death is a neces- 
sary part in the general organic progress of the re- 
ligious life of the world, we can now study to great 
advantage the divine predictions of its death and 
the causes of it. The gradual degradation and final 
destruction of the apostolic Church by successive 
deteriorations of life and doctrine are clearly and 
amply foretold in the sacred writings. The christian 
Church has never truly comprehended these divine 
predictions of its decline and doom, because it has 
trusted to the light of the literal sense only of the 
Word of God, while the spiritual meaning of that 
Word has been concealed from its eyes. 

When and how and why that spiritual sense has 
been unfolded, and what it is, will be explained here- 
after. The reader is here invited to witness the 
practical working of it, to see what clear, beautiful, 
and instructive solutions it gives to some of the most 

remarkable and difficult passages of the Bible. This 
80 



PROOFS FROM THE WORD. gl 

spiritual sense is so simple, consistent, and striking, 
that it needs no demonstration. It can be seen by 
its own light and requires no proving. The reader 
will intuitively feel its fitness and beauty, and he 
will recognize the divine truth of it, just in propor- 
tion as his affections are really enlisted in the pursuit 
of truth for its own heavenly sake. 

" And Jesus went out and departed from the temple , 
and Ms disciples came to him for to show him the build- 
ings of the temple. 

u And Jesus said unto them. See ye no* all these things ? 
Verily I say unto you, There shall not be left here one 
stone upon another that shall not be thrown down" 

This seems to refer to the destruction of Jerusalem 
which occurred about forty years after, but that it 
had also a profounder and more spiritual significa- 
tion is evident from the vejse which follows : 

" And as he sat upon the mount of Olives, the disciples 
came unto him privately, saying, Tell us, when shall these 
things be ? and what shall be the sign of thy coming and 
the end of the world?" 

The overthrow of Jerusalem, the destruction of 
the temple, the coming of the Son of Man, and the 
end of the world were regarded by the apostles and 
the first christians as connected and coincident events, 

/ 



82 THE END OF THE WORLD. 

which they confidently expected to occur during that 
very generation in which they lived. We who now 
see clearly the error of their literal interpretation, 
may still discern the connection and coincidence of 
the spiritual events which were involved in the 
letter. 

Jerusalem is obviously typical of the Church of 
God. It was not over the degenerate city of David 
that our Lord raised the voice of lamentation, but 
over the corrupt spiritual state of the Jewish people. 
The destruction of Jerusalem is the end or consum- 
mation of the existing dispensation, whether it be 
Mosaic or apostolic. The prophets under the typical 
figure of Jerusalem unveil the heart and life of the 
Church as it exists to-day and proclaim its doom. 
The restoration of Jerusalem is no historical event 
which we may expect, but a re-establishment of a 
divine Church in the world, the crown and glory of 
all the divine dispensations. 

The temple is the spiritual life of God in the in- 
dividual soul. The " temple of the Lord are these," 
said Jeremiah. " Ye are the temple of the Lord," 
said Paul, and again, "Your body is the temple of 
the Holy Ghost which is in you." The christian's 
spiritual house or temple is composed of all the di- 
vine truths which he believes and obeys, and which 



PROOFS FROM TEE WORD. g3 

like beautiful precious stones are compactly built 
together, as in a glorious house for the worship of 
God. The Lord purifies His temple, casts out the 
money-changers and those that sell doves, when He 
expels the sordid affections and false opinions from 
our religious life. Our temple is desecrated and de- 
stroyed when we corrupt the truths of the gospel 
and lead a corresponding life of evil, for then the 
Lord departs from it and leaves us desolate. 

When a Church has lost the central and unitizing 
spirit of charity, so that its members no longer co- 
here or operate together with fraternal affection; 
when it has perverted and corrupted the doctrines 
given to it from heaven, so that in their falsity they 
no louger agree with or support each other, our Lord 
goes out and departs from it. It is left desolate, and 
the doom, of which it is unconscious, treads closely 
upon it. The affections of its members are dead, 
their understandings are darkened, their conceptions 
of truth are broken down like unconnected and use- 
less stones, their lives become as disorderly and in- 
coherent as their doctrines, their spiritual house has 
fallen to pieces, its stones are disjointed, its pillars 
are broken, its altar is shattered, it is a ruin. 

Such was the spiritual state of the Jewish Church 
when our Lord explored it, and the historical de- 



84 THE END OF THE WORLD. 

struction of Jerusalem and the temple was the cor- 
responding physical judgment which followed. The 
spiritual state of the first christian Church is pre- 
cisely similar to-day, and necessitates the end of the 
world and the coming of Christ. 

The external Church is changeable and perishable, 
being subject to all human contingencies. Churches 
like men can backslide and become castaways. But 
the invisible, spiritual, universal Church of God is 
imperishable, and is forever striving to flow down 
into outward forms and inspire them with its own 
ineffable life. Man may falsify, profane, and de- 
stroy the truth in his own heart and mind. God 
will surely resurrect, reconstruct, and perpetuate it 
in the mind and life of the race. 

" Destroy this temple, and in three days will I raise it 

up" 

" But he spake of the temple of his body.' 1 

What is the body of Christ? " Ye are the body 
of Christ/' said Paul, " and members in particular." 
And again, " For we are members of his body, of 
his flesh, and of his bones." The body of Christ is 
the organized Church of Christ; and when one 
Church perishes, spiritually speaking, by the rejec- 
tion of the Lord's truth from its faith, and His life 
from its conduct, He raises up another in its place. 



PROOFS FROM THE WORD. $5 

The three days are the three states of His own life, 
His divine love, divine wisdom, and divine power, 
by which His work is effected. 

In the symbolic language of Scripture the con- 
summation or closure of one dispensation of truth 
is called the end of the world. The birth and 
growth of another dispensation in its place is called 
the coming of Christ. The spiritual processes by 
which these things are effected constitute the judg- 
ment. The passage from the death of the old state 
into the life of the new one is the resurrection of the 
dead. The destruction of Jerusalem, the restoration 
of Jerusalem, the judgment, the coming of Christ, 
the end of the world are associated and coincident 
spiritual events, which occur at the end of every dis- 
pensation. It was the Jerusalem of the apostolic 
Church, the temple of christian worship, whose 
downfall our Lord predicted in connection with His 
second coming to judge the world. 

When the disciples asked our Lord concerning the 
destruction of Jerusalem, and the signs of His com- 
ing, and the end of the world, He gave in symbolic 
language a sketch of the spiritual changes which 
would take place in the Church He was then estab- 
lishing between its foundation and its destruction. 
Their understandings were withheld from compre- 



86 THE END OF THE WORLD. 

hending the meaning of His words, which are now 
so clear and wonderful in the light of the spiritual 
sense. They would have been immeasurably sad- 
dened and discouraged, could they have interpreted 
His symbols rightly. He predicted nothing which 
could flatter their hopes or gratify their ambition. 
He described no victories and conquests, no grand 
developments of doctrine, no glorious revivals, no 
steady marches onward to the heavenly heights, such 
as the men of the dead Church fondly imagine they 
see, when looking backwards over the long sweep of 
ecclesiastical history. 

On the contrary His words are dark and terrible, 
invested with funereal gloom. The danger of de- 
ception, false Christs, false prophets, persecutions, 
the increase of iniquity, the waning of faith, the 
triumph of abominations, the destruction of Jerusa- 
lem, tribulations, earthquakes, famines, pestilences, 
lightnings, the carcase and the gathered eagles, the 
sun and moon darkened, the stars falling from 
heaven ; these are the sinister images which expressed 
the coming history of His Church, as the Christ 
surveyed it from His seat on the mount of Olives. 

Knowing that His own character and mission was 
the central doctrine of the Church, which must give 
form and power to all derivative and subordinate 



PROOFS FROM THE WORD. 87 

doctrines, and foreseeing that the truth on the sub- 
ject would be misunderstood and perverted, He be- 
gins His prophecy with these singular words : 

" Take heed that no man deceive you. 

" For many shall come in my name, saying, I am 
Christ, and shall deceive many" 

This prophecy has never had any literal fulfilment, 
for it would be very absurd to bring in evidence the 
few miserable fanatics or lunatics, who have here and 
there asserted themselves to be the returning Christ, 
as there has never been one of sufficient character or 
influence to produce even the faintest ripple on the 
stream of ecclesiastical history. These false Christs 
were clearly not persons but doctrinals and dogmas, 
false conceptions of the nature and work of our 
Lord. Whenever a council or synod, after the usual 
long and violent discussions, formulated and promul- 
gated a false doctrine, or false interpretation of Scrip- 
ture in relation to Christ, and pronounced it an 
article of the christian faith, it created a false Christ 
which deceived many. 

This process began very early in the Church and 
tainted the fountain of spiritual truth at its very 
origin. John, the beloved apostle, denounces the 
appearance of antichrist, which he defines to be a 
denial that God became flesh in the person of Jesus 



88 THE END OF THE WORLD. 

Christ. He says there were many antichrists in his 
own day, or many misconceptions of the nature and 
mission of Christ. He states the divine truth very 
clearly : " He that abideth in the doctrine of Christ, 
he hath both the Father and the Son," which agrees 
with the statement of Paul, "for in him (Christ) 
dwelleth the fulness of the Godhead bodily." This 
doctrine of the Father and Son made absolutely one 
Being in one person by the glorification of Christ, 
was the apostolic and true idea of our Lord. 

In the course of two or three centuries that central 
truth was falsified and virtually lost, and after a 
while false Christs and false prophets arose, " show- 
ing great signs and wonders," until the whole body 
of christian doctrine was reduced to its present inco- 
herent and irrational state. It will be sufficient in 
this place to name four of these false Christs, these 
terrible phantoms, which have usurped the place of 
the true Christ or the genuine truth, in the minds 
and hearts of God's people. These idols, unknown 
to the Word of God, were conceived in the brain 
and fashioned by the hand of man. These are they 
of whom so many christian councils and leaders have 
proclaimed, " Lo ! here is Christ !" 

I. The doctrine that the Supreme Being consists 
of Three Persons, coequal and consubstantial, each 



PROOFS FROM THE WORD. g9 

person being distinctly and verily God, and that 
Christ is the Second Person in this trinity. 

II. The doctrine that the Second Person of this 
trinity suffered the punishment of the sins of the 
world to satisfy divine justice, and that the First 
Person accepted that punishment as a satisfaction for 
His violated laws. 

III. The doctrine that man is saved, not by keep- 
ing the commandments of God, as the Scriptures 
uniformly declare, but by the strong mental exercise 
of faith in the merits of Jesus Chris f . 

IV. The doctrine that regeneration is miraculously 
and instantaneously effected, by the imputation of 
the righteousness of Christ to the sinner who accepts 
what are called the terms of salvation. 

These fundamental or cardinal teachings, tritheism, 
vicarious atonement, faith alone, and instantaneous 
conversion by the imputed righteousness of Christ, 
are what our Lord was contemplating under the 
figure of false Christs who should deceive many. 
They have maintained themselves in the Church by 
great signs and wonders, and millions of certificates 
of their healing and miraculous powers. They are 
fundamentally false, destructive and obstructive of 
the genuine life of Christ in the soul, and are the 

deep-seated but hitherto unrecognized causes of the 

8* 



90 THE END OF THE WORLD. 

evil and hopeless state of the Church and the world, 
of which more will be said when the evidences to 
be derived from history are considered. 

There is a close, logical connection, not visible in 
the letter, but very clear in the spiritual sense, be- 
tween the prediction of the coming of the false 
Christs and the verses which follow : 

" And ye shall hear of wars and rumours of wars : 
" For nation shall rise against nation, and kingdom 
against kingdom : and there shall be famines, and pesti- 
lences, and earthquakes in divers places ." 

These are not literal events, for similar phenomena 
have occurred during every century since the begin- 
ning of the world, and would be of no value what- 
ever as signs, and could have no causative relation 
to the destruction of Jerusalem. Our Lord alludes 
to spiritual w T ars, spiritual famines, spiritual pesti- 
lences, spiritual earthquakes, as states of the interior 
life of the Church which of necessity follow the 
preaching of false doctrine, misrepresenting the 
character and mission of Christ. A spiritual war 
is a collision of doctrines in the Church ; spiritual 
famine is the consequent dearth of the true life of 
Christ in the soul ; spiritual pestilence is a morbid 
and diseased state of morality produced by false doc- 
trines, such as hermetism, asceticism, celibacy, hys- 



PROOFS FROM THE WORD. 91 

terical quietism, and other strange and perverted 
states of life. A spiritual earthquake is a disruption 
in the Church. All these things are signs of the 
destruction of Jerusalem because they are the causes 
which aid in destroying it. 

Faith in divine truth is the supreme power that 
leads to the salvation of the soul and the perfection 
of society. On the contrary, faith in false doctrines 
poisons the spiritual life at its fountains, darkens the 
understanding, perverts the character, and sheds an 
insensible but baneful influence through the indi- 
vidual, the family, and the church, over every por- 
tion and into the minutest affairs and interests of 
human life. The perversion of truth is therefore 
"the beginning of sorrows." Only the revealing 
light of the spiritual world can show how corrupting 
and fatal to mankind have been those great false 
Christs, which are loved and treasured by the dead 
Church as the most sacred and beautiful truths. 

The terrors of the christian in the judgment will 
not arise from the fact that every evil thing he 
has ever thought or done will be recalled to him- 
self and exposed to others. That will be dreadful 
enough, but there is something deeper, more or- 
ganic, more dreadful still. He will discover, and 
it will be an astounding discovery to him, that his 



92 THE END OF THE WORLD. 

supposed good was not good, his supposed truth 
was not truth : that all his goodness had his own 
self-love as its concealed root, and all his faith was 
mental delusion, and that by reason of these things, 
with the best intentions on his part, his whole 
nature has been warped into wrong directions, and 
his whole life, even unconsciously to himself, has 
been false. These are they of whom our Lord 
says : 

" Many icill say unto me in that day Lord, Lord, have 
we not prophesied in thy name ? and in thy name have 
cast out devils, and in thy name done many wonderful 
works ? 

" And then will I prof ess unto them, I never knew you : 
depart from me, ye that work iniquity" — Matt. vii. 
22, 23. 

False doctrines take peace from the heart of the 
individual, from the Church, and from the world. 
Their emblem is the sword. They initiate differ- 
ences, contentions, persecutions, and hatreds, intestine 
commotions in society and in the family, animosities 
between sects, congregations, and individuals. Con- 
flicts of opinion and doctrine engendering dislike, 
contempt, misrepresentation, and persecution; doubts, 
fears, anxieties, tribulations; the earthquakes of 
ecclesiastical disruption, the pestilence of spiritual 



PROOFS FROM THE WORD. 93 

disease, the famines of spiritual destitution ; the 
envies, the alienations, the betrayals, the conceal- 
ments, the desolations, the hungers, the sorrows of 
the world ; all these are the fruits of the false doc- 
trines which our Lord foresaw, the great false 
Christs which have totally misrepresented His char- 
acter, His mission, and the object of His incar- 
nation. 

What becomes of the genuine truths of the gospel 
of Christ amid all this gathering darkness and sor- 
row ? Their melancholy fate is next predicted. 

" They shall lay hands on you and persecute you, de- 
livering you up to the synagogues, and into prisons, being 
brought before kings and rulers for my names sake. 

" And ye shall be betrayed both by parents and breth- 
ren and kinsfolks and friends: and some of you shall they 
cause to be put to death. 

" And ye shall be hated of all men for my name's 
sake." 

Who are these disciples ? The spiritual sense of 
the Word of God always rises above persons and 
things and places; "for the spirit searcheth all 
things, yea, the deep things of God." As the false 
Christs were not persons but cardinal errors, so the 
disciples of Christ are the divine truths of the 
Church, taught by Christ and sent forth for the 



94 THE END OF THE WORLD. 

guidance and salvation of men. It is therefore com- 
manded that they should not speak from themselves, 
but only what was given to them to say, " for it is 
not ye that speak, but the Holy Ghost/ 5 

Christ's predictions about the future of His Church 
were not made in the presence of all His disciples, 
but only of four of them, those who were nearest to 
Him, and who from their intimacy with Him ques- 
tioned Him privately about these sublime questions. 
They therefore represented the higher and holier 
truths of the religious life, obedience to which unites 
us most closely with our Lord. To illustrate the 
matter clearly let us recall from the Word of God 
some of those divine truths or genuine disciples of 
Christ, which have received the cruel treatment pre- 
dicted at the hands of the Church and the world. 

" This is my commandment, that ye love one another as 
I have loved you." Jno. xv. 12. 

" Ye also ought to wash one another s feet, 

11 For I have given you an example, that ye should do 
as I have done to you" Jno. xiii. 14, 15. 

" Whoever shall smite thee on the right cheek, turn to 
him the other also." Matt. v. 39. 

" Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good 
to them that hate you, and pray for them which despite- 
fully use you and persecute you." Matt. v. 44. 



PROOFS FROM THE WORD, 95 

" If thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out and cast it 
from thee." Matt. v. 27. 

" Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself" Matt. xix. 19. 

" Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth — 

" For where your treasure is, there your heart will be 
also." Matt. v. 19-21. 

" Judge not that ye be not judged." Matt. vi. 1. 

u He that findeth his life shall lose it: and he that loseih 
his life for my sake, shall find it" Matt. x. 39. 

" Be ye therefore perfect even as your Father in heaven 
is perfect." Matt. v. 48. 

" He that is greatest among you shall be your servant" 
Matt, xxiii. 11. 

" If thou wilt be perfect, go and sell that thou hast 
and give to the poor " Matt. xix. 21. 

" Lord, how often shall my brother sin against me, and 
I forgive him ? Until seven times ? 

" Jesus saith unto him, I say not unto thee until seven 
times, but until seventy times seven." Matt, xviii. 21, 22. 

" If thou wilt enter into life, keep the commandments" 
Matt. xix. 17. 

These sentences fell from the divine lips, and con- 
tain the root, pith, and marrow of the christian 
religion. These are the true and immortal disciples 
— "not a hair of your head shall perish" — that 
Christ sent forth to evangelize the world. What 
has become of them ? Where are they to be found ? 



96 THE END OF THE WORLD. 

Where are these heavenly truths thoroughly taught, 
believed, and lived out in the daily life ? Have they 
not been cited and discussed before synagogues and 
churches, explained away by subtle evasions and 
prevarications, and practically pronounced to be 
beautiful and heavenly impossibilities? Have they 
not been arraigned before the kings and rulers of the 
earth, whose other names are ambition and selfishness 
and mammon and lust, and have they not been de- 
nounced as busy-bodies, disturbers of the peace, vis- 
ionary enthusiasts, miserable fanatics who would 
disorganize society and upset the world ? 

When these Christ-like principles, humilities, self- 
abnegations, and surrenders are pressed as impera- 
tive duties, are they not " hated of all men" ? Are 
they not " bound and in prison," when the doctrines 
and usages of the Church and the institutions of so- 
ciety are such that the true christian finds it impos- 
sible to bring these beloved principles into action ? 
Are they not " put to death" when the Church de- 
scends to such lower levels of thought and action, 
that these great principles cease to be the ruling and 
vital elements in christian conduct ? Have not all 
these things happened ? 

There is a deep meaning concealed under the state- 
ment that the disciples are " betrayed both by pa- 



PROOFS FROM THE WORD. 97 

rents and brethren and kinsfolks and friends." 
Truths like ideas have family relations. One is born 
of another, one begets another : they have affinities, 
resemblances, alliances, and related uses ; they are all 
kinsfolks and friends to each other. Genuine truths 
stand together in their family system in perfect order 
and harmony. They are never at variance; they 
never hate, or betray, or destroy one another. When, 
however, a truth is perverted or falsified, and retains 
its place in the general body of religious doctrine, it 
becomes the centre of baleful and destructive in- 
fluences to all the rest. It is a father, or a brother, 
or a friend, who is ready to mislead, to betray, and 
to destroy. 

This subject admits of, and perhaps requires, im- 
mense amplification, but one or two central and forci- 
ble illustrations must suffice. 

When we believe the divine truth that Jesus 
Christ is no second person of the Trinity, but is 
Himself the Trinity, and a God of infinite love and 
mercy, who never condemns or punishes, who for- 
gives without limit or condition, who is never angry 
or partial, whose tender mercies flow forth to all His 
children, the good and evil alike, and who is a per- 
petual fountain of life and blessing to all, we can 

then perceive that His commands to us are in the 

e 9 9 



98 THE END OF THE WORLD. 

profoundest harmony with His own nature, and that 
to be like Him and with Him we must love as He 
loves, give as He gives, love and bless our enemies, 
forgive seventy times seven times, judge not, gather 
not for ourselves but for others, and lay down our 
lives for the brethren. 

But when this divine truth is displaced by a false 
Christ — a doctrine that the divine justice demands 
the infinite punishment of sin, and that God is only 
satisfied with the bloody sacrifice of His own inno- 
cent son; what a fearful father have we introduced 
into the body of religious doctrine to betray and de- 
stroy the rest ! Now what discord where all was 
order and peace ! Father against son and son against 
father ! How contradictory and absurd it now be- 
comes, with such a divine model before us, to tell 
us not to judge our neighbor, to forgive seventy 
times seven times, to love and bless our enemies 
and to pray for them that hate and persecute 
us ! This false Christ is responsible for all the 
bitterness, the hatred, the persecutions, the blood- 
shed of all the religious wars, when the Church 
made its enemies the enemies of heaven, and pro- 
ceeded, in the blasphemous use of Christ's name, 
to wreak the imaginary vengeance of God upon 
them. 



PROOFS FROM THE WORD. 99 

Again, when- we believe the divine truth, that 
Jesus is the way, the life, and the resurrection ; that 
the plan of salvation is to open the doors of our soul 
to His influences, and to follow Him in the regenera- 
tion, striving with Him against sin, conquering in 
temptations by His strength, imitating His example, 
keeping His commandments, eating His flesh and 
drinking His blood so as to become lost in Him and 
one with Him ; how beautiful and harmonious and 
effective are all the precepts of His gospel ! We 
realize " the deep things of God." We understand 
the profound meanings of forgiveness without limit, 
of washing each other's feet, of plucking out the right 
eye, of turning the cheek to the smiter, of giving all 
to the poor, of laying up treasures in heaven, of the 
sweetness and greatness of the humblest services, of 
the perfect life and perfect joy that come from keep- 
ing the commandments of One whose yoke is so easy 
and whose burden is so light ! 

But when this heavenly truth is displaced by a 
false Christ, a new doctrine, a legal or metaphysical 
plan of salvation, whereby the sinner who declares 
his faith in the sufficiency of Christ's sufferings to 
appease the wrath of the Father against him, is not 
only forgiven his sins, but is washed and made 
thoroughly clean and fitted for heaven by having 



100 THE END OF THE WORLD. 

the righteousness of Christ imputed to him as if it 
were his own, what shall we say ? This pretended 
truth is a false father, a false brother, a false friend, 
who will cunningly and secretly deceive, undermine, 
betray, and destroy the genuine truths of heaven. 
There is no organic and logical connection between 
this false Christ, and the redemptive life-work of 
the real Christ, and the regenerative life-work of the 
followers of Christ. Begotten in falsehood, beget- 
ting falsehoods innumerable, this great false Christ 
is responsible for the darkened understandings, the 
wavering faith, the lax morals, the late repentances, 
the seared consciences, the indifferentism, the shams, 
frauds, and hypocrisies of the Church and the 
world. 

The evangelical " scheme of salvation" leaves en- 
tirely out of view the great central truth of theol- 
ogy, that the glorification of the human nature of 
Jesus Christ and His union with the Father is the 
exact type of our own regeneration and our spir- 
itual union with the Divine Man, which must be 
effected in the same manner and according to the 
same laws. The only road to heaven is to have the 
spirit of Christ born in us, to be circumcised with 
Christ, to be baptized with Him, to be tempted as He 
was, to strive against sin as He did, even unto blood, 



PROOFS FROM THE WORD. JQ1 

to overcome evil by His power, to follow Him and 
walk even as He walked, to be sanctified with Him 
and by Him, to die, as He did, to our carnal natures 
and to rise, as He did, into the perfections of an 
endless spiritual life. All these solemn truths, mark- 
ing out the life-work of the christian, are made 
useless and impotent or destroyed by the false doc- 
trines of instantaneous conversion, by the impu- 
tation of Christ's righteousness and salvation by 
faith alone. 

When the false Christs have perverted religious 
faith, and the true disciples are cast out of the syn- 
agogue, or bound in prison or put to death, what 
more natural than that " false prophets" should arise 
and deceive many ? These also are not persons but 
minor dogmas, springing from and associated with 
the other evil and false things which are already 
destroying the Church. The false prophet is the 
antithesis of the disciple. The disciple learns and 
obeys, the false prophet affects to teach and com- 
mand. The disciple follows closely the command- 
ments of God, the false prophet glorifies the specu- 
lations and the traditions of men. The following 
are some of the "false prophets" which have de- 
ceived and desolated the christian Church : the doc- 
trines of the material resurrection of the dead, the 

9* 



102 THE END OF THE WORLD. 

literal coming of Christ in the clouds, the sinfulness 
of heresy, the infallibility of the Church, apostolic 
succession, election and predestination, irresistible 
grace, transubstantiation, celibacy of the clergy, im- 
maculate conception of the virgin, infant regenera- 
tion, and all the pride, pomp, and self-righteousness 
of ritualism and ecclesiasticism. 

The false Christs and false prophets, working 
signs and wonders and miracles, so as to deceive the 
very elect (all of which has been done), have been 
the secret causes of the declension of the Church, 
of the continued falsification of truth and the de- 
terioration of morals to such an extent, that the end 
of the apostolic dispensation is inevitable. The spir- 
itual Jerusalem of to-day, the present christian 
Church, is encompassed by armies, its people are 
perishing by the sword, for there are swords of error 
as well as of truth, they are led away captives by 
innumerable heresies, and the city is trodden down 
by the Gentiles or given over entirely to the worldly 
and secular spirit. Those sects will be always the 
most prosperous which conform to the fixed cus- 
toms of the world, and offer the cheapest and the 
most vicious schemes of salvation. 

Enemies without and within, scientism, rational- 
ism, formalism, heresies, and indifferentism worse 



PROOFS FROM THE WORD. JQ3 

than heresy ; hypocrisy, treachery, bigotry, spiritual 
abominations in high places; false Christs standing 
blasphemously in the holy of holies ; these are the 
encompassing armies, the internal treasons, the evil 
causes at work, which our Lord foresaw, and which 
induced Him to predict a doom of increasing degra- 
dation and sorrows, until the Church becomes "a 
carcase" where the eagles are gathered together. Its 
desolation is accomplished, its goodly stones are 
thrown down one upon another, and our Lord Him- 
self commands every one to leave it and no one to 
join it. 

11 Let them which are in the midst of it depart out : 
and let not them that are in the countries enter thereinto." 
Luke xxi. 21. 

This final end of the Church, when it has no 
status in the sight of heaven, arrives, our Lord de- 
clares, when " the abomination of desolation" is seen 
standing in the holy place. This is the abominable 
and melancholy condition of the interior christian 
life, when the doctrines given from the pulpit are 
utterly destitute of the divine truth. This is the case 
when a pretentious religiosity has taken the place 
of religion, and when the Church is a mere social 
machine, powerfully held together by the clergy, for 
their support, self-glorification, and mutual adula- 



104 THE END 0F THE WORLD. 

tion. Nor is this inconsistent with a very high de- 
gree of culture, goodness, and piety among the clergy 
themselves, and a total unconsciousness on their part, 
for the light within them is darkness, of their own 
real spiritual state or that of their people. 

Some idea of one of the many phases of "the 
abomination of desolation" standing in the holy 
place may be formed from two little incidents of 
recent occurrence. A young revivalist of great elo- 
quence, which is simply the magnetism of the voice, 
carried on a protracted meeting with such intense 
excitement and so many instantaneous conversions, 
that a sensational leader called it " a second day of 
Pentecost." The burden of his preaching was the 
infinite wrath of the Father, the terrible and endless 
sufferings of a burning hell, and the certainty that 
whoever rejected the " scheme of salvation" com- 
mitted the unpardonable sin. His preaching pro- 
duced not only conversions, but delirium and in- 
sanity in some cases, and many morbid states of the 
nervous system in others. The conversions made by 
preaching a false God, a false hell, a false interpre- 
tation of Scripture are religious phantasies which 
can only travestie the genuine religion of Christ. 
These are the signs and wonders and sham miracles 
of the false Christ. 



PROOFS FROM THE WORD. J()5 

The other incident thoroughly illustrates the 
modern Church as a mere machine. A clergyman 
applied to the governor of one of our States for a 
longer delay of sentence of death in case of a noted 
criminal, on the ground that it would take him sev- 
eral days longer to prepare the poor fellow to meet 
his God ! And the criminal, in writing to his 
mother, alludes to "the prayers and sacraments 
which I have received from the good fathers here, 
who have so well prepared my soul, that I pray 
God may give them credit for it hereafter" ! 

u Tlxen let them which are in Judea flee unto the moun- 
tains." 

Jerusalem being the Church, Judea is the world 
outside of and surrounding the Church. They are 
warned not to enter the Church, but to resort to the 
mountains, to turn away from the spurious virtues 
of a self-righteous and pretentious but doomed sys- 
tem, and to cultivate the nobler, loftier, and more 
elevating principles of natural religion, honor, pro- 
bity, and justice. Better, far better, the positive re- 
ligion of humanity, or any scientific system of social 
ethics than a desecrated Christianity. This verse 
also commands those who are in states of natural 
goodness to look to the Lord alone for light and 
help — to flee to the " mountain of the Lord." 



106 THE END 0F THE WORLD. 

" Let him which is on the housetop not come down to 
take anything out of his house" 

Let the good churchman or christian who is 
already " on the housetop" or in elevated states of 
heavenly affections, surrender all the substance of 
his house, his faith, his doctrines, his Church, and 
all his beloved institutions, as things no longer of 
any value, as something not worth saving or having. 
He can find the true Church, "the kingdom of 
heaven" within us, much better without these incum- 
brances than with them. 

" Neither let him which is in the field return bach to 
take his clothes" 

Let him who has wandered from the house of the 
Church into whatever field of heresy or skepticism, 
not go back again after the old garments he had left 
behind, the old faith, the old doctrines, the old forms. 
They are perfectly dead and worthless in the new 
age of heavenly light which is dawning. Let the 
dead bury their dead. 

"What," says the startled christian, "shall we 
discard our faith? Shall we abandon our Churches? 
Shall we break up our organizations ? Would not 
society be dissolved and religion lost?" Alas! gen- 
uine religion is already lost, and society is on the 



PROOFS FROM THE WORD. 1Q7 

eve of dissolution. These are not my words, dear 
reader ! but the words of the Christ, and His own 
interpretation of them, and He alone is responsible 
for the formidable issues to which they seem to lead. 
" Woe unto them that are with child, and to them that 
give such in those days." 

The literalist sees nothing in these words but the 
sufferings of the feebler sex amid the terrors of war 
and revolution. They have a far deeper spiritual 
signification. They indicate the great difficulty and 
suffering experienced when attempting to live the 
genuine christian life amid the present notorious ' 
corruptions and usages of society, of which the 
Church itself is the cause, the confederate, and the 
participant. The affections, which are feminine and 
always represented by women, receive the truths of 
faith, bear them in their bosom, and in due time 
bring them forth into practical life. They nourish 
and foster our divine ideals until they come to ma- 
turity and we realize them in action. We are pained 
and straitened until this be accomplished. When 
the Christ is conceived in us, and struggles to come 
forth in a life of perfect sanctification of soul and 
body, and utter consecration of self to the service 
of others, what obstacles, what difficulties, what sheer 
impossibilities lie in one's way! A divine despair 



108 THE END OF THE WORLD. 

overwhelms us when we see our heavenly ideals 
perish. 

" In every sect," says an acute thinker, " are mul- 
titudes of the very purest and best of God's children, 
gasping like fishes in pools which the receding waters 
have left mere slime and ooze, out of their element 
and yet not daring to struggle out of their surround- 
ings, because each verily believes that God placed 
him there, or by His Spirit led him thither, and that 
escape is criminal. But to drop the figure : these 
good men strive with all their might to unfold a 
heavenly manhood for themselves and others, under 
conditions which make that manhood impossible." 

" But pray ye that your flight be not in winter \ nor on 
the Sabbath day" 

These words so trivial in appearance indicate the 
last extremity of spiritual destitution to which the 
race shall be driven ; a point in which death shall 
overtake them in one of two painful conditions, one 
represented by winter, the other by the Sabbath day. 
Winter is the state of the sinner, or of the godless 
world, cold, dead, leafless, flowerless, fruitless, hope- 
less. The Sabbath day is here used, as we know by 
the context, in its opposite or evil sense: the broken, 
profaned, and desecrated Sabbath, to which our Lord 
alludes as an abomination unto Him. To die on the 
Sabbath day in the consummated Church, is to die 



PROOFS FROM THE WORD. JQ9 

in a state of spiritual profanation, professing to be 
guided by the precepts of the gospel, and yet not to 
have one of the divine elements of Christ's character 
wrought as a living and organic power into the soul. 

If this state of things continues, if the Church 
grows more worldly and the world more evil, if 
society continues to degenerate and the good find it 
impossible to live the life of genuine truth, what may 
we expect ? The Christ Himself answers, for His 
words are always beautifully and logically connected 
from the first to the last : 

" Then shall be great tribulation, such as was not from 
the beginning of the world to this time, no, nor ever shall 
be. 

" And except those days should be shortened, there 
should no flesh be saved : but for the elect's sake, those 
days shall be shortened.^ 

Those days are shortened, or the old dispensation 
is broken up and ended, by the coming of the Son 
of Man, the end of the world, the judgment, the 
resurrection of the dead, and the institution of a 
new heaven and a new earth. 

Whatever these expressions may mean, it is clear 
from the Sacred Scriptures, that before these stu- 
pendous events shall occur, the Church established 

by the apostles will undergo the most terrible de- 

10 



HO THE END OF THE WORLD. 

clensions, iniquity shall abound, the love of many 
wax cold, heresies and false doctrines shall prevail, 
not outside of the Church but within it, yea stand- 
ing blasphemously in its pulpits and at its altars. 
The Protestants point to the Catholics, and the Cath- 
olics to the Protestants in confirmation of these ful- 
filled prophecies. The spiritual sense, rising about 
persons and parties, into the region of principles 
and universal truths, unfolds the secret causes and 
methods by which the whole Church has been 
brought to its consummation. 

Is the world ready to believe that Christ is coming 
again with new powers and new revelations, to judge 
all things and to restore all things, to create a new 
heaven and a new earth ? 

" There shall come in the last days scoffers, walking 
after their own lusts, 

u And saying, Where is the promise of his coming ? 
for since the fathers fell asleep, all things continue as they 
were from the beginning of the creation." 

Is the Church ready to accept these spiritual in- 
terpretations of the Word of God? to see its condi- 
tion and the remedy? to look for the Son of Man 
where only He can be seen, in His opened Word ? 
and to aid in the institution of the new heaven and 
the new earth ? No ! so surely as the prophecies of 



PROOFS FROM THE WORD. \\\ 

God are true, no! Both clergy and laity will 
scoff and reject. In this same chapter of Matthew, 
our Lord predicts that His unfaithful Church, saying 
in its heart, " My Lord delayeth His coming," will 
not watch and wait as He commanded, but will eat 
and drink with the drunken, or make all kinds of 
compromises with the evil and the false. He de- 
clares that it will be so indifferent and unbelieving, so 
ignorant of its own spiritual condition and the signs 
of the times, that His second coming shall be "as in 
the days that were before the flood, when they were 
eating and drinking, and marrying and giving in 
marriage until the day that Noe entered the ark." 

Why is He said to come in the night like a thief? 
Because the present state of the world and the 
Church, which we blindly consider to be the noon- 
day of civilization, appeared to His divine eye as a 
night of impenetrable darkness. Because He comes 
secretly, quietly, and without observation, unsuspected 
by those who are looking for Him in an entirely 
different manner. And lastly, because He will really 
rob us of everything we have loved and valued, 
our favorite ideas and opinions, our treasures, our 
churches, our institutions, our selfhood. It is only 
after we have been stripped of all, that we can recog- 
nize Him as the infinite Father, Lover, and Giver. 



CHAPTER Y. 

PROOFS FROM THE WORD (Continued). 

rTIHE words of the Master must have made a pro- 
- 1 - found impression upon the disciples, for the 
young Church continued a long time in states of 
deep humiliation and watchfulness ; anticipating no 
social and political triumphs, no growth of ecclesias- 
tical power and splendor, no blazing lights of civili- 
zation, but in constant dread of false Christs and 
false prophets, and that general deterioration of doc- 
trine and degradation of life which our Lord had so 
forcibly predicted. 

Although they misconceived the nature and time 
of the Second Coming, and assigned the young 
Church a very short instead of a very long duration, 
they remembered the Lord's declaration, that its 
career would be full of troubles, trials, and dangers, 
worse at the end than in the beginning, and that in 
consequence of the fearful state of things which 
would exist, Christ would come again to save the 
elect and to judge the world. 

The following is Paul's prediction of what the real 

112 



PROOFS FROM THE WORD. \\% 

character of christians in the last times would be, 
and one would think he was describing the sinful 
and unprofessing world, were it not for his positive 
statement that these people will profess the forms of 
godliness. 

" Tliis know also , that in the last days perilous times 
shall come. 

11 For men shall be lovers of their own selves , covetous, 
boasters, proud, blasphemers, disobedient to parents, un- 
thankful, unholy. 

u Without natural affection, truce-breakers, false ac- 
cusers, incontinent, fierce, despisers of those that are good : 

" Traitors, heady, high-minded, lovers of pleasure more 
than lovers of God : 

" Having a form of godliness, but denying the power 
thereof: 1 2d Tim. iii. 1-5. 

There is greater authority, however, than Paul's 
for the declaration that the apostolic Church was to 
undergo a gradual deterioration of doctrine and life, 
to such a point that its evils and falsities should cry- 
aloud to the mercy and justice of heaven for its ex- 
tinction. The same Jesus who sketched the coming 
history of His Church to the disciples on the Mount 
of Olives, appeared long afterwards to John in the 
isle of Patmos, and gave him, in a series of symbolic 

visions, a complete view of the spiritual character of 
h 10* 



114 THE END OF THE WORLD. 

his Church and of the judgments which must inevita- 
bly overtake it. We have now the key to those 
symbols (of which more hereafter), and I invite the 
christian reader to survey some of the spiritual won- 
ders contained in the sixth chapter of the book of 
Revelation. 

Let us first glance at the sublime prelude to the 
opening of the seven seals. The apostle sees a door 
opened in heaven and hears a voice like a trumpet 
saying, " Come up hither and I will show thee things 
which shall be hereafter." He then enters into the 
spiritual state, and sees the throne of God, out of 
which proceed " lightnings and thunders and voices," 
and witnesses the worship and glorification of the 
Supreme Being by representatives of everything in 
His created universe. 

In the hand of Him who sat upon the throne is a 
mystical book, " written within and on the back side, 
sealed with seven seals." This is the book of the 
knowledge of God concerning all events, past, pres- 
ent, and future. It is written without and within, 
because all lives, all Churches, all events, have a 
double nature and meaning, one composed of exter- 
nal appearances or all that is visible, the other of 
internal, invisible, and spiritual realities. These 
latter are known to God only. No one therefore can 



PROOFS FROM THE WORD. JJ5 

break the seals or open the book but the Lion of the 
tribe of Judah, or the divine wisdom, whose other 
name is the Lamb of God, or the divine love. 

One sees plainly from this that the revelations 
which are made by the opening of this book cannot 
be revelations of external events, of ecclesiastical and 
political revolutions. Such things were written on 
the back side or outside of the book. The things 
contained within the book relate to the interior or 
spiritual life of the Church, its changes of relation to 
God and His Word, its changes of faith and charity, 
and its practical relations to the life of Christ within 
the soul. Nor from the structure of the Book of 
Eevelation can we expect these exposures of the 
future spiritual life of the Church, and of each in- 
dividual member of the Church, to be made in any 
other than the symbolic form. Not a line of it is 
susceptible of any literal interpretation. And the 
one great mistake of all commentators, leading inva- 
riably to mere guesswork and error, has been the 
attempt to apply these symbols to external phenom- 
ena, such as the historic movements of Churches and 
kingdoms. 

On the opening of the first four seals the apostle 
has four successive visions of different-colored horses 
°nd their riders. The truths involved in the whole 



11 g THE END OF THE WORLD. 

series depend upon what the horse symbolizes, what 
the variations of color import, and what the riders 
and their emblems may signify. The successive 
tableaux reveal the consecutive states of the apostolic 
Church in its interpretation of the Word of God, and 
in the application of its doctrines to the conduct of 
life. How can this be made perfectly clear to the 
comprehension of a tolerably well instructed chris- 
tian mind? 

The horse in ancient symbolism represented the 
human understanding in pursuit of knowledge. 
This arose probably from the manifold uses of the 
horse in all the industries and acquisitions of both 
peace and war. Therefore the horse was dedicated 
to Minerva, the goddess of wisdom. A horse with 
wings, Pegasus, was the human mind in its ethereal 
and poetic flights. When religious subjects are the 
points in question, a rider on a horse would indi- 
cate the operation of the mind in its conception and 
use of spiritual truths. Take a few illustrations. 

The Word of God is represented as riding on a 
white horse, followed by the angels of heaven on 
white horses, to show the power of the divine wis- 
dom to illuminate the understandings of all created 
intelligences upon spiritual subjects. 

To "smite every horse of the people with blind- 



PROOFS FROM THE WORD. U7 

ness" (Zech. xii. 4) is to darken the understanding so 
that spiritual truth can be no longer seen. 

The chariot of fire and the horses of fire which 
carried Elijah to heaven, represent the mind purified 
and elevated to spiritual heights by the truths of the 
divine life. 

When Hosea says " Ashur shall not save us : we 
will not ride upon horses : neither will we say any 
more to the w r ork of our hands, Ye are our gods," 
he means that they would no longer trust to their 
own understandings in spiritual matters. 

The kings of Israel were prohibited from " multi- 
plying horses to themselves," nor did they permit 
the people to go down into Egypt after horses. 
Why ? Because the Jewish dispensation was strictly 
representative, ordained for a literal-minded and 
sensual people, who were governed by a system of 
rewards and punishments, and by direct inspiration 
of their priesthood, and were not permitted to know 
or to pry into the spiritual mysteries concealed under 
their ceremonials. In proportion as the Jewish mind 
exercised itself about spiritual mysteries in opposi- 
tion to the divine commands, the people disregarded 
this prohibition about the use of horses from Egypt. 
Solomon was especially guilty in this respect,, even 
collecting all the wisdom of the ancients concerning 



118 THE END OF THE WORLD. 

spiritual things and trusting supremely to his own 
understanding ; wherefore he is represented as own- 
ing forty thousand horses. 

These illustrations of the symbolism of the horse 
are sufficient to show that a vision of horses and their 
riders issuing forth on the opening of the different 
seals, must imply in that special connection a revela- 
tion of the successive states of the christian under- 
standing as to the meaning of the divine truth, and 
its application to the practical duties of life. With 
this explanation of what we may expect to learn, 
let us approach the first tableau. 

" And I saw, and behold a white horse : and he that 
sat on him had a bow : and a crown was given unto him : 
and he went forth conquering and to conquer" 

This represents the christian of the young apos- 
tolic Church, understanding and obeying the glorious 
truths of the gospel, as they came unperverted by 
human sophistications from the lips of Christ. White 
is the color of genuine truth and of that spotless 
purity of life which it requires and produces. Armed 
and crowned, he goes forth, conquering and to con- 
quer, representing the power of spiritual truth in 
its purity to overcome all evil. He wears the crown 
of life because he has triumphed in temptation, even 
as his Lord was also tempted and overcame. This 



PROOFS FROM THE WORD. HQ 

christian is en rapport with those armies of heaven 
who follow the Word upon white horses, or who love 
and obey the Lord from the highest perception of 
spiritual truth. 

There is a great reason, seen only by the science 
of correspondences, why this rider uses the bow in- 
stead of the sword in his contest with the evils of 
the w T orld. The sword is truth exercising judgment. 
A weapon wrought of deadly cold metal, made in 
one piece, wielded by one hand, it represents justice 
separate from mercy, truth unmarried to good. The 
bow and arrow, composed of two pieces which must 
be accurately fitted to each other, and available only 
by the use of both hands, represents truth contending 
against evil in conjunction with good, or that perfect 
union of faith and charity which alone can regen- 
erate the individual and subdue the world to the 
christian life. 

Tableau 2d. " There went out another horse that was 
red : and power was given to him that sat thereon to take 
peace from the earth, and that they should kill one 
another : and there was given unto him a great sword." 

Red is the color of passion. It is the symbol of 
love, and in an evil sense, of the love of self and the 
world. A change had taken place in the spiritual 



120 THE END OF THE WORLD. 

affections of the Church. They had been turned 
away from God and the neighbor. Selfishness, self- 
conceit, pride, worldly ambition, covetousness, and 
all the evils so forcibly described by the apostles had 
invaded the christian world. White, in which all 
the rays of truth are harmoniously combined, was 
no longer the proper representative color. Affections 
concentrated upon self and the little world which is 
subservient to self, pervert the Word of God and con- 
strue it to favor their own desires and lusts. They 
diffract and disorganize the white ray, and seize 
upon that one of the colors which represents and 
harmonizes with the fire of their own corrupted life. 
Evil conduct thus darkens the understanding and 
leads inevitably to false interpretations of the Word 
of God. Then arise the false Christs and false 
prophets. 

Evil in the heart, falsehood in the intellect, and 
the result must be to take peace from the earth, and 
to cause men to distrust, despise, betray, and kill one 
another. Then truth, or w r hat men take for truth, 
becomes a great sword, an instrument of judgment 
and vengeance. Articles of faith, rituals of religion, 
adhesion to the Church, obedience to leaders, become 
the tests of the christian life. Dissensions arise, the 
sword is the arbiter, and mutual destruction the 



PROOFS FROM THE WORD. 121 

result ; while both sides defend their principles and 
conduct by an appeal to a wrested and corrupted 
Word. The heresies, persecutions, inquisitions, and 
religious wars of Europe for many centuries were 
the natural effects of such causes. The genuine dis- 
ciples were brought before synagogues and rulers 
and cast into prison or put to death. 

Tableau 3d. " Lo ! a black horse, and he that sat on 
him had a pair of balances in his hand. 

" And I heard a voice in the midst of the four beasts, 
say, A measure of wheat for a penny, and three measures 
of barley for a penny : and see thou hurt not the oil and 
the wineT 

This rider with the balances in his hand is not 
justice, as is commonly supposed; for justice, which 
is synonymous with truth, would ride upon a white 
horse and not a black one, which is the symbol of 
falsity. The rider on the red horse construes the 
Word of God in accommodation to his own lusts and 
desires, and to justify his evil conduct of life. As 
this continues, the understanding grows darker and 
darker, and less and less able to see the mysteries of 
divine truth, until black becomes its representative 
color. This catastrophe is hastened, if the intellect 
of man, protesting boldly against the abuses and cor- 
ruptions of the Church, takes the interpretation of 
f 11 



122 TEE END OF THE WORLD. 

the Scriptures into its own hands. Then arises the 
critical and skeptical spirit. He holds the balances, 
and weighs, scrutinizes and criticizes all things from 
the light of his own self-derived intelligence. 

What is the result? When the unregenerate 
human will is divorced from the divine will by evil 
of life, and the intellect explores the divine Word 
by its own independent light, it soon asserts that the 
Bible is amenable to the same canons of criticism as 
any other book. The result is, innumerable conflicts 
of opinion, the formation of new sects full of the old 
spirit, the development of rationalism and scientism 
in religion, and the final degradation and corruption 
of every spiritual truth to the level of the most 
literal and sensuous interpretation. The darkness 
which ensues is the darkness of ignorance, not that 
of denial, which is a succeeding and lower step. The 
Church believes or tries to believe the Word of God, 
but it totally misunderstands it. 

This darkened state of the intellect still further 
deteriorates the conduct and ideal of christian life. 
It invents " schemes of redemption" and " plans of 
salvation" which cheapen and make easy the work 
of regeneration. " A measure of wheat for a penny, 
and three measures of barley for a penny" is the cry 
all throughout the Protestant Churches. Bread is 



PROOFS FROM THE WORD. 123 

the genuine life of God in the soul. Christ is the 
bread of heaven given for our sustenance. To put 
a cheap and contemptuous price upon bread (a 
measure of wheat for a penny) is to proclaim that 
charity and good works, keeping the commandments, 
have no importance or power in the work of regen- 
eration. Then iniquity abounds, love waxes cold, 
sorrows and tribulations prevail, and " the abomina- 
tion of desolation" ascends into the holy place. 

So great has been the destruction of genuine good 
and truth in the Church by the successive dogmas, 
the false Christs, and false prophets of the Roman 
Catholic and Protestant communions, that deplorable 
indeed would have been the state of man, if God in 
His mercy had not providentially guarded from in- 
jury " the oil and the wine." The oil and the wine 
are the interior or spiritual truths of the Word, and 
also the interior states of goodness and wisdom to 
which the humble and sincere worshipper may attain, 
independently and in spite of his doctrinal errors, 
and which lift him above his creed and carry him 
forward in advance of his ecclesiastical surroundings. 
This is the reason why the diseased and dying 
Church has produced such shining lights as Fenelon, 
Guyon, Wesley, Bunyan, Robert Hall, Channing, 
Robertson, and thousands of kindred spirits, whose 



124 THE END OF THE WORLD. 

sanctities of grace could not be repressed or obscured 
by their fallacies of opinion. These, however, have 
been too few in number and too feeble in influence, 
to prevent the unfolding of the next fearful act of 
the drama, which our own and the coming genera- 
tions are to witness. 

Tableau 4th. " And I looked, and behold a pale horse : 
and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell fol- 
lowed with him. And power was given unto them over 
the fourth part of the earth, to hill with sword, and with 
hunger, and with death, and with the beasts of the earth." 

This terrible picture is the logical sequence of the 
two which preceded. Jesus Christ is the life of the 
world. Unless we eat His flesh and drink His 
blood, or become like Him and a part of Him, we 
have no life in us. There is no other salvation but 
in becoming Christ-like. All else is delusion, mock- 
ery, phantasy, spiritual death. Jesus Christ is the 
Word made flesh. The Word is God. The Scrip- 
tures are not only plenarily inspired, they are abso- 
lutely divine. They contain the words of eternal 
life because they embody and conceal the spirit and 
the power of the living God. To deny their truth 
is to reject the Lord, and to cut ourselves off from 
the best spiritual influences in the universe. It is 
spiritual death. 






PROOFS FROM THE WORD. 125 

Pale means colorless, lifeless. Black is the oppo- 
site of white, the affirmation of a falsehood in place 
of a truth. Pale or colorless implies the absence or 
utter destitution of truth. To ride on the pale horse 
is to deny the Word of God altogether, to repudiate 
its teachings, to place it on a level with all other 
books, and to pronounce it an old dead record of 
Hebrew traditions. The rider is called Death, be- 
cause he who has arrived at this stage of opinion, 
has renounced all faith in spiritual things and is 
dead to their influences. Hell, or the unhappy state 
of the unregenerate, must necessarily follow. Scient- 
ism, rationalism, positivism, spiritism, sensualism, 
and communism are the shadowy and terrible forms 
which accompany the pale horse and his rider. Jeru- 
salem is now trodden down by the Gentiles, and the 
Church is a carcase where the eagles are gathered 
together. The flight of the soul is now in the 
winter of evil or on the desecrated day of the Sab- 
bath. 

Notice the symbols of the four successive steps by 

which this rider destroys the soul of mankind. 

First, by the sword, the strength and sharpness and 

terror of the false doctrines which strike down the 

faith and the principles of the believer. These gone, 

what next ? Hunger : not the hunger of the good 

11* 



126 THE END 0F THE WORLD. 

after righteousness, but the hunger of the soul lost 
to God, all the old barriers broken down, after its 
own selfish and sensual gratifications. What must 
necessarily follow? Death: the death of the soul, 
the loss of spiritual life from these very gratifica- 
tions; dead to all genuine goodness, all truth, all 
noble and heavenly aspirations. What next ? To 
be devoured by the wild beasts of the earth, to be 
consumed by the evil passions of our carnal nature. 
This is the Hell which follows spiritual death just 
as spiritual death follows a denial of the Word of 
God. 

To this end would it come at last, the Church 
destroyed and society bestialized ; if the causes now 
at work were permitted to go on unopposed and un- 
suspended. All flesh would be finally destroyed 
unless new influences were introduced to elevate and 
save the race. It is for the elect's sake that the 
days are shortened. Judgment at last overtakes the 
Church and the world, when it becomes necessary to 
save the good from the assaults of the evil, and to 
restore a better state of religion and society, so that 
goodness may not perish but may be perpetuated in 
the earth. The state of the elect or the " remnant" 
in the evil age when they cry bitterly for a change 
of things is pictured in the next tableau. 



PROOFS FROM THE WORD. J27 

Tableau 5th. " And when he had opened the fifth seal, 
I saw under the altar the souls of them that were slain 
for the Word of God, and for the testimony which they 
held ; 

" And they cried with a loud voice, saying, How long, 
Lord holy and true, dost thou not judge and avenge 
our blood on them that dwell on the earth f 

" And white robes were given unto every one of them : 
and it teas said unto them, that they should rest yet for a 
little season, until their fellow servants also and their 
brethren, that should be hilled as they were, should be ful- 
filled:' 

This is evidently the wail of despairing souls, un- 
able to realize the divine ideals within them on 
account of the dead Church, and the evil world 
which surrounds them ; unable to worship God be- 
fore the altar as they would, but mercifully preserved 
under it from the destruction of the faithless. These 
are " the elect," " the remnant/' kept as the apple 
of His eye, hidden as under the shadow of His 
wings. They lament on account of this repression 
and bondage, and implore the deliverance of the 
truth from the violence and falsehood that fill the 
earth, and prevent " the manifestation of the Sons 
of God." " When, O Lord," they cry, " when shall 
thy divine truth prevail ? when shall it descend to 



128 THE END OF THE WORLD. 

judge the world and the Church? and to separate 
the evil from the good ? so Thy will shall be done 
upon earth even as it is done in heaven." 

These servants of the Lord who are thus perse- 
cuted and rendered helpless and killed, are really 
the highest truths of the divine life which have been 
virtually repudiated in the Church; such as "thou 
shalt love thy neighbor as thyself/' "Judge not/' 
" love your enemies/' " sell all thou hast and give to 
the poor/' " wash one another's feet/' " Lay not up 
for yourselves treasures upon earth/' etc. These 
heavenly truths are personified by the sincere chris- 
tians who endeavor to live them out in their lives, 
and bewail that evil state of the world and the 
Church which ignores and renders impracticable the 
first principles of the christian life. Their whole 
organism is in travail and in pain to be delivered 
into higher service and into purer love. 

They are said to be " slain" when their voices of 
warning, their examples of holiness, their testimony 
for the truth, are derided, rejected, and cast out as 
of no account by an unbelieving Church and a god- 
less world. Christ is said to be slain or crucified 
afresh when we reject His summons and disobey 
His commands. The Lamb appeared "as if it had 
been slain" because the goodness and purity of the 



PROOFS FROM THE WORD. J 29 

divine love were virtually destroyed in the hearts of 
men. So much of the divine life in us as cannot be 
realized in a vicious state of society is said to be 
" slain for the Word of God," repudiated and re- 
jected as fanaticism and folly. The perfect christian 
life excites the spirit of hatred in the unregenerate, 
and the distrust or contempt of those christians who 
are satisfied with lower levels of thought and lower 
standards of goodness. 

These are they who, although belonging nominally 
to all the Churches, find no true altars of God in 
the world. These are they who have left Jerusalem 
trodden under foot of the Gentiles, and have fled to 
the mountains. These are they who remain on the 
house-tops, and do not attempt to save the con- 
demned substance in the house. These are they who 
make no effort to recover the useless garments left 
behind them. These are they who bear under their 
bosoms and nourish at their breasts that divine life 
which is the infant Christ in the soul, and who for 
that reason are brought into strange trials and tribu- 
lations, crying out, " How long, O Lord, holy and 
true !" 

These despairing souls are comforted by the spir- 
itual truths of the divine Word, the white robes, 
which are given or revealed to them, and which 



130 THE END 0F THE WORLD. 

enable them to bear with patience their loneliness, 
their persecutions, their sufferings, their desolation 
until the fulness of time, when they shall be delivered, 
individually and collectively, by almighty power. 

It is a solemn fact, and one that foreshadows the 
destiny of the world, that the only answer given to 
these faithful servants, who are waiting and yearning 
for the kingdom of God, is a command to wait in 
patience until the rest of their brethren are killed 
also, — that is, until all the good and true are sepa- 
rated from the Church, and she fills her cup of con- 
demnation to the full. There is no promise of a 
better day, of a renovated Church, or a purified 
world. No ; the slaughter of the innocents must 
proceed; the martyrs must accumulate; the world 
must grow worse and worse. When the regenerate 
life is rendered generally impossible, by the irre- 
mediably vicious state of the Church and of society, 
the culmination is reached; the old order must 

9 

perish, the new order must begin. Hence the day 
of the Lord, the judgment, the end of the world. 
How severely logical is the next vision ! 

Tableau 6th. " And I beheld when he had opened the 
sixth seal, and lo ! there was a great earthquake ; the sun 
became black as sackcloth of hair and the moon became 
as blood: 



PROOFS FEOM THE WORD. \§\ 

" And the stars of heaven fell unto the earth, even as a 
Jig-tree casteth her untimely jigs when she is shaken of a 
mighty wind. 

" And the heaven departed as a scroll when it is rolled 
together, and every mountain and island were moved out 
of their places" 

This is the logical and necessary culmination of 
the preceding order of events. And as this order is 
substantially the same as that described with other 
and different symbols in the prophecy of Christ on 
the Mount of Olives, that order is also terminated 
by a similar catastrophe, showing that the events 
signified were fundamentally the same. 

" Immediately after the tribulation of those days, shall 
the sun be darkened, and the moon shall not give her light, 
and the stars shall fall from heaven, and the powers of the 
heavens shall be shaken" 

Although these great events appear to have a cer- 
tain historical sequence, pointing to primitive Chris- 
tianity, Catholicism, Protestantism, and modern nat- 
uralism, or infidelity, we must not forget that the 
spiritual sense of the Word of God rises above per- 
sons and places, and deals with the relations of the 
soul itself to its Maker. The four riders on the 
four horses represent states of the religious life 
which have co-existed in every Church and in every 



132 THE END OF THE WORLD. 

era, notwithstanding the general truth of the four 
great successive historical developments. The spir- 
itual state of many Catholics might be represented 
by the rider on the black horse, and that of many 
Protestants by the rider on the red. The state rep- 
resented by the rider on the white horse is rare at 
the present day, while that represented by the rider 
on the pale horse is exceedingly common. 

The Word has always a private application to 
every individual history, as well as to the composite 
Church. These four states may succeed each other 
in the experiences of the individual soul, and the 
course of a backsliding christian, who passes from 
the state of conqueror over his evils, down through 
successive stages of self-love and self-deception, to 
the state of unbelief, denial, and spiritual death, is 
a perfect miniature picture of the terrible catas- 
trophe which has happened to the apostolic Church. 

I wish now to take my reader away back to the 
seventh chapter of the prophet Daniel, that John of 
the Old Testament, and show him essentially the 
same prophecy of the four successive declensions of 
the Church of God, until a judgment upon it became 
imperative. It is a vision of four beasts coming up 
out of the sea, and bearing clear and beautiful rela- 
tions to the four horses and their riders described by 



PROOFS FROM THE WORD. 133 

John. This chapter alone, unlocked by the key of 
correspondences, will prove that the book of Daniel 
is authentic, and that he was a divinely inspired 
prophet of the Lord, whatever modern critics may 
say to the contrary. 

The vision of John foretold the changing states 
of the Church as to its understanding of the Word 
of God, and its application to the conduct of life. 
These degenerated step by step into a total denial 
of the essential inspiration and divinity of the Word, 
rendering a judgment an absolute necessity. Daniel 
goes psychologically deeper. He describes the cor- 
responding affections or animus of the Church in 
its progressive decline from its highest state down- 
wards to one of spiritual death, when he too has a 
vision of the retributive judgment. 

" I saw" said Daniel, " and behold, the four winds of 
heaven strove upon the great sea" 

The influx of the spiritual world into the natural 

world, represented by the winds from all the four 

quarters of heaven stirring the great sea, is the cause 

of life and all its phenomena, physical, intellectual, 

moral, and social. This contention of wind and 

sea, or of spiritual and natural, is always going on, 

and history, civil and ecclesiastical, is the result. 

12 



134 THE END OF THE WORLD. 

When life, individual or national, is wrought into a 
great tempest by the influx of evil spiritual forces, 
it is Christ only who can rebuke the winds and the 
waves and give us the great calm. 

" And four great beasts came up from the sea, diverse 
one from another T 

Animals represent our living affections and emo- 
tions, our quality as to the will principle of life. 
No animal exists which is not the representative or 
correspondence of some element of human affection. 
The four great beasts, diverse oue from another, 
typify four great generic changes in the spiritual 
affections or animus of the Church, corresponding to 
the four intellectual states in relation to the Divine 
Word represented by the four horses. 

" The first was like a lion, and had eagle's wings : I 
beheld until the wings thereof were plucked, wherewith it 
was lifted up from the earth (marginal rendering), and 
made stand upon the feet as a man, and a maris heart 
was given to it.' 1 

This is the animus of the Church fresh from the 
hands of its founder : powerful, majestic, royal, like 
the crowned and lion-hearted rider of the white 
horse, going forth to conquer. It has eagle's wings, 
or the spiritual truths of the Word, which, when 



PROOFS FROM THE WORD. J 35 

joined to good affections, lift us from the earth of 
our carnal nature and make us truly men, or give 
us a man's heart. Daniel looked until those wings 
were plucked, or until those spiritual truths of re- 
ligion, derived from Christ, were destroyed and lost. 
The loss of those great truths concerning His nature, 
His incarnation, and His mission was the cause of 
all the subsequent declensions of the Church. There- 
fore the next picture shows the heart of the Church, 
or the member of the Church, despiritualized and 
sunk into its natural selfishness; for without the 
revealed truths of heaven we lapse into sensualism. 

" And behold another beast, a second like to a bear, 
and it raised up for itself one dominion (marginal render- 
ing), and it had three ribs in the mouth of it between the 
teeth of it : and they said thus unto it, Arise, devour much 
flesh." 

The lion plucked of his eagle's wings is followed 
by a mean, shuffling, hairy, greedy, sensual beast, 
afraid of the light and hiding in woods and caves. 
He stands with the bloody marks of death and 
slaughter about him, a type of gluttony, ferocity, 
and sensuality, aspiring to one dominion, or in his 
supreme selfishness to universal rule. This is the 
secret animus of a Church, or a man, bereft of spir- 
itual light. It is the animus of the rider upon the 



136 THE END OF THE WORLD. 

red horse, who took peace from the earth, and de- 
stroyed with death those who did not submit to his 
dominion, which in the shape of the one indivisible, 
infallible Church he desired to extend over the whole 
earth. Rome, however, is but the type, and the type 
is repeated everywhere, in sects and individuals. 
Wherever selfishness, pretension, bigotry, and self- 
righteousness prevail, we have the rider upon the 
red horse with the heart of the bear in his bosom. 

" After this I beheld, and lo I another like a leopard, 
which had upon the back of it four wings of a fowl: the 
beast also had four heads, and dominion was given unto 
it." 

The animus of the Church now takes a different 
but still hideous form, that of a cruel, treacherous, 
spotted creature. Those who shrink from contem- 
plating the fact that such animals really represent 
the secret heart of themselves or the Church, know 
little of the Church or themselves, or of the wild 
beasts which inhabit the unfathomable dens of our 
fallen nature. The spots of this leopard indicate the 
advancing falsifications of doctrine and profanations 
of life, the mixture of the true and the false, the 
good and the evil. A Church professing to believe, 
not blindly by tradition like the Catholics, but after 
a full and free exercise of the rational faculties, in 



PROOFS FROM THE WORD. J 37 

a stern and avenging God, a cruel and eternal hell, 
and at the same time in false, cheap, and vicious 
schemes of salvation, is fitly represented, as to its 
innermost and concealed affections, by a cruel, treach- 
erous, and spotted beast. 

And still the creature has wings, for this Church 
has unquestionable aspirations after spiritual things, 
and God has preserved the oil and the wine for its 
future salvation. It endeavors to soar upwards, but 
in vain, for its wings are those of a common fowl, 
and not of an eagle. Its truths, being strictly lit- 
eral, are low and sensuous, and cannot carry it 
towards the sun of heaven. This Church also ac- 
quires power and influence, but it cannot aspire to 
one dominion, for it has four heads or different ways 
of thinking, pointing to all the quarters of heaven, 
so it cannot concentrate its ambitions to the estab- 
lishment of one great hierarchy. It has the animus 
of the critical rider of the black horse, who had the 
balances in his hands, and weighed and determined 
the value of everything by the exercise of his own 
reason. 

" After this I saw in the night visions, and behold a 
fourth beast, dreadful and terrible and strong exceed- 
ingly : and it had great iron teeth : it devoured and brake 
in pieces, and stamped the residue with the feet of it : and 

12* 



138 THE END 0F THE WORLD. 

it was diverse from all the beasts that were before it : and 
it had ten horns" 

This terrible beast corresponds to the heart or the 
affections of the rider upon the pale horse, whose 
name was Death and whom Hell followed, and who 
had power to slay with the sword, and with hunger, 
and with death, and with the beasts of the earth. 
This is the spirit of all the deniers and scornful re- 
pudiators of the Word of God, in and out of the 
Churches, scientists, rationalists, spiritists, and infi- 
dels. This hideous creature has no spiritual life 
whatever ; and looks more like a terrible automaton 
or machine with his teeth of iron and nails of brass. 
In this it was diverse from all the others. Its vio- 
lent animosity against spiritual things is displayed 
in its rending, devouring, and stamping to pieces 
with its feet all the other beasts which made some 
effort or pretension to the worship and love of God. 
Sensualism is its real name, believing nothing out- 
side of the mechanics of nature, and submitting to 
no restraints upon its selfish will. Its great power 
in the world is represented by the ten horns, and 
that it is " strong exceedingly" our modern experi- 
ences painfully testify. 

This godless spirit, animating the rider upon the 
pale horse and the terrible beast with the iron teeth, 



PROOFS FROM THE WORD. J 39 

destroying all spiritual faiths and hopes, and exalt- 
ing itself above God, making Man the only God 
and Humanity the only religion, is no doubt the 
object alluded to by Paul as " the son of perdition," 
a figure very absurdly applied by some bigoted Pro- 
testants to the Catholic Church, and by some bigoted 
Catholics to the Protestant reformation. 

" Let no man deceive you by any means : for that day 
shall not come, except there come a falling away first, and 
that man of sin be revealed, the son of perdition ; 

" Who opposeth and exalteth himself above all that is 
called God , or that is worshipped ; so that he as God sit- 
teth in the temple of God, showing himself that he is 
God." 2 Thess. ii. 3-4. 

If the reader will carefully consider the spirit and 
the details of these three great prophecies, that of 
Jesus, that of John, and that of Daniel, he will dis- 
cover that, under different types and symbols, they 
refer to the same course of events, and predict the 
changes of the spiritual life of the Church, its 
gradual and successive falsification of doctrine and 
degradation of the standard of religion, the conse- 
quent rise of the unbelieving and irreligious spirit, 
and the culmination of evil to such a degree that 
goodness and truth are in great danger of extinction, 
so that judgment becomes inevitable, the end of the 



140 THE END 0F THE WORLD. 

world arrives, and the Son of Man appears. Daniel 
too agrees with the others in declaring the straight- 
ened and suffering state of those who strive to realize 
their heavenly ideals, for he says that the great and 
terrible beast u shall speak great words against the 
Most High, and shall wear out the saints of the 
Most High, . . . and they shall be given into his 
hand," etc. 

In contradiction of these reiterated prophecies of 
the Word of God, the christian Church of to-day 
regards itself as in possession of divine truth in 
all its purity and power. It thinks the false Christs 
and false prophets were heresies or heretics outside 
of its pale, and it refuses to apply to its own spir- 
itual condition any of the symbols of falsification 
of doctrine or degradation of life which have been 
explained. It has ears but it does not hear. It has 
eyes but it does not see. It is a blind leader of the 
blind. And yet the true state of the Church and 
of society show that these wonderful predictions 
have been accomplished, and that all the phenomena 
connected with the end of the world are occurring 
or about to occur. 

I will now proceed to illustrate and strengthen 
the prophecies of the Divine Word by sketching the 
historical stages and evidences of the decline. The 



PROOFS FROM THE WORD. \±\ 

greatest blessing one can confer upon the christian 
of the present age is to convince him that his 
Church, no matter what it may be, is no longer the 
Church of Christ, but a judged and doomed institu- 
tion, from which he should escape as soon as possi- 
ble. Its atmosphere is so darkened that he cannot 
see or discover the truth, so long as his affections, 
predilections, sympathies, and traditions keep him 
attached to the orthodox communions. He is like 
the blind man whom Christ could not heal until He 
had led him out of the town. Happy are they whom 
Christ has so led out of the old town of orthodoxy, 
enlightened with spiritual truth, and charged never 
to return to their delusions again ! 



CHAPTER VI. 

PKOOFS FKOM HISTOKY. 

TTOW came it to pass that a Church originating 
"""-^ with Christ and organized by the apostles, in- 
doctrinated into a true faith and holiness of life by 
John and James and Peter and Paul, has departed 
so far from its sublime models, that the words of 
Jeremiah may be truly applied to it ? 

" The prophets prophesy falsely r , and the priests hear 
rule by their means : and my people love to have it so : 
and what will ye do in the end thereof?" Jer. v. 31. 

So long as the primitive Church obeyed in child- 
like faith the sublime precepts of the Lord Jesus 
Christ, it realized more or less vividly the grand 
ideal of holiness taught by the apostles. It was 
then the young hero, with the crown upon his head 
and the bow in his hand, riding forth upon the white 
horse, conquering and to conquer. It was the lion 
with eagle's wings and a man's heart. This morning, 
spring time, or golden age of the Church lasted a 
hundred or a hundred and fifty years. During the 

most of that period, it manifested the spirit and 
142 



PROOFS FROM HISTORY. J 43 

power of God; made innumerable converts from 
Jews and Gentiles ; planted its altars in every nook 
and corner of the Roman Empire ; kept itself un- 
spotted from the world ; exhibited in its member- 
ship an apostolic holiness of life, a glorious commu- 
nion of saints; wrestled successfully with heresies 
within and temptations and persecutions without; 
and acquired such a spiritual ascendancy over the 
hearts and minds of men, that all its subsequent 
declensions and follies, terrible as they were, could 
not prevent its being the chief ag^nt in the civiliza- 
tion of Europe, and the grand conservator of exter- 
nal order and morality even to the present times. 

The apostolic Church began its career as the com- 
mune of Christ. The members, animated by the 
heavenly spirit of its founder, were ready to aban- 
don their possessions and to lay down their lives for 
their brethren. Ananias and Sapphira, who kept 
back a part of their means, were punished w r ith 
death, as much for their covetousness as for their 
falsehood. Everything was held in common, and 
the precious ideas " liberty, equality, and fraternity" 
experienced a brief but genuine realization in this 
world of sin and sorrow. 

After it was found impossible to retain the com- 
munal form, on account of the outward pressure of 



144 THE END OF THE WORLD. 

a corrupt social state, the communal spirit remained 
in vigor for a long time. The loftiest altruism ani- 
mated the little Church. To bear one another's bur- 
dens, to abjure riches, to scorn covetousness, to culti- 
vate self-denial and humility, to prefer others to self, 
to judge no one, to forgive without limit, to love and 
pray for enemies, to lay up treasures in heaven only, 
to walk daily with Christ, these were the proofs and 
the tests of christian character. When we survey 
the competitions, the dissensions, the selfishness, the 
covetousness, the ambitions, the close-fistedness, the 
unneighborliness of the present christian world, we 
may well wonder how the principles upon which a 
Church was founded have become so thoroughly in- 
verted ! 

The principle has already been laid down, and is 
indeed a law of the spiritual life, that the interior 
state of the Church determines the exterior condition 
of the world, and that each may be seen from the 
other, although neither may be conscious of the fact. 
This was the law of the Jewish economy, which was 
strictly representative of spiritual truths. There was 
peace or war, famine or plenty, defeat or success, 
prosperity or adversity, according to the varying atti- 
tudes of the Church towards the divine source of its 
life. So is it always. In confirmation of this law, 



PROOFS FROM HISTORY. \\§ 

the fact may be noted, that when the apostolic 
Church got fairly under way in its golden career, 
the fortunes of the Roman Empire experienced a 
wonderful change, and it was blest for nearly a hun- 
dred years with the good government of five consec- 
utive emperors, who administered their duties with 
such wisdom and justice and mercy, that the skepti- 
cal Gibbon calls their successive reigns "the happiest 
period of the human race/' Nor can we doubt that 
this happy period would have been indefinitely con- 
tinued, had the Church remained faithful to the 
doctrines and the life of Christ. 

During this golden period, what was the attitude 
of the Church towards the Word of God ? for there- 
in lies the secret of its progress. It was received in 
implicit and loving faith as wholly and absolutely 
inspired. It was the fountain of life. Every jot 
and tittle of it was full of the Holy Ghost, spiritual 
and imperishable. " Every word of the law," said 
the Rabbi, "has a sublime sense and a heavenly 
mystery." u The divine Scriptures," said Chrysos- 
tom, " declare nothing vaguely or without intention, 
but every syllable and every point have some mys- 
tery hidden within it." The Holy Writings were read 
and expounded in the Churches. They were the 
light and lamp to the feet of the primitive christian. 
g k 13 



\ 



146 THE END OF THE WORLD. 

" From a child" said Paul to Timothy, " thou hast 
known the holy Scriptures : which are able to make thee 
wise unto salvation through faith which is in Christ Jesus. 

" All Scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is 
profitable for doctrine, for reproof for correction, for in- 
struction in righteousness : 

u That the man of God may be perfect, thoroughly fur- 
nished unto all good works. 11 

The saintly people of that infant Church which 
" gathered about the sunlit feet of Jesus," not only 
grew spiritually upon the Word of God, but they 
lived spiritually in the presence and by the power 
of Christ. They knew and felt the meaning of the 
mystic words, " I in them and thou in me." Their 
lives were " hid with Christ in God." They seemed 
to live externally, but like Paul they did not live in 
the self-hood, but Christ lived in them and they in 
Christ. 

This Church had a somewhat different theology 
from that which is now taught in our christian pul- 
pits. The Supreme Being was not, to their imagina- 
tions, an angry Father, but a Father who so loved the 
world that He bowed the heavens and came down 
in the person of Jesus Christ to save it. " God in 
Christ" reconciling the world to Himself (not Christ 
out of God reconciling the Father to the world) was 



PROOFS FROM HISTORY. 147 

the only God they worshipped. They knew nothing 
about three persons in the Godhead, or vicarious 
punishment, satisfaction, and atonement. Those doc- 
trines were subsequent inventions of a degenerating 
Church. They felt that the new birth or the bap- 
tism of fire was effected by the divine Saviour, God 
in Christ, entering into their willing and believing 
hearts, and gradually transforming their whole 
nature to His heavenly will. The " mystery of god- 
liness" lay in that single fact, nor was any theory of 
punishment, or justice, or satisfaction or atonement 
necessary to explain the gospel truth, as it had been 
preached by the lips of the Divine Man. 

Why was not this golden era continued ? this be- 
atific vision transmitted with ever increasing glory 
to posterity ? It was impossible. Had not God de- 
scended to save the world at the time He did, sal- 
vation would have been impracticable, for mankind 
would have sunk into bestial states from which there 
could have been no deliverance. Yet the world was 
not prepared to receive the Lord. He came to His 
own and His own knew Him not. His first coming 
was in gloom and darkness. There were no social, 
civil, political, or material planes or bases upon 
which a true external kingdom of heaven could be 
erected. These things are absolutely necessary to the 



148 THE END OF THE WORLD. 

evolution of the truly regenerate life upon earth. 
The spiritual forces of the apostolic Church have 
been expended in the struggle for modern civiliza- 
tion ; and now that proper external forms for liberty, 
equality, fraternity, and the divine life in man are 
almost ready, the Church is dead and powerless, and 
there must be another coming of Christ, and new 
light and new fire from heaven for the future needs 
of the race. 

" In the first two centuries of the christian Church, 
the moral elevation was extremely high, and was 
continually appealed to as a proof of the divinity of 
the creed. In the century before the conversion of 
Constantine (the third) a marked depression was 
already manifest. The two centuries after Constan- 
tine are uniformly represented by the Fathers as a 
period of general and scandalous vice/ 7 (Leckey's 
History of European Morals, vol. ii. page 17.) 

What was the cause of this melancholy change ? 
The appearance of false Christs that deceived the 
body of the Church, the development of new and 
erroneous doctrines as to the nature of God and the 
mission of Jesus, which poisoned the mind and de- 
teriorated the standards of christian life. 

One cause, no doubt, of the rise of these false 
Christs was the severe conflicts which the Church 



PROOFS FROM HISTORY. 149 

underwent with Judaism, paganism, and the oriental 
philosophies, from which sources its converts were 
derived. The clear-cut truths of Christianity were 
.more or less tainted or perverted in passing through 
the minds of these new and ardent disciples, and 
heresies of all sorts began to appear. Declensions 
of life and doctrine go hand in hand. The old unity 
of faith and spirit was gradually lost, and the com- 
munion of saints disintegrated into groups of dis- 
cordant congregations. The divine life in Christ 
Jesus became more and more rare. Faith took the 
precedence of charity; conformity to rituals over- 
shadowed the primitive holiness of spirit; and as- 
ceticism of manners became a base substitute for 
sanctification of heart. 

" If Christianity," says Milman, its most eloquent 
historian, " was making such rapid progress in the 
conquest of the world, the world was making fearful 
reprisals on Christianity. By enlisting new passions 
and interests in its cause, religion surrendered itself 
to an inseparable fellowship with those passions and 
interests. The more it mingles in the tide of human 
affairs the more turbid becomes the stream of chris- 
tian history. In the intoxication of power the 
christian, like ordinary men, forgot his original 
character, and the religion of Jesus, instead of dif- 
fusing peace and happiness through society, might 

13* 



150 T.HE END OF THE WORLD. 

to a superficial observer of human affairs, seem in- 
troduced only as a new element of discord and 
niiserv." 

The dissensions and disintegrations of the Church 
became so grievous, that Constantine, the first chris- 
tian emperor of Rome, summoned by imperial man- 
date, a general council or senate of the distinguished 
heads of all the christian communities in the empire^ 
to determine the true doctrine on all contested points^ 
and to settle definitively and dogmatically the faith 
of the Church. It was a fearful and fatal mistake. 
It not only revealed the extent to which the Church 
had departed from the genuine truths of the gospel, 
but it fixed those departures as the permanent and 
unalterable faith of Christendom. 

This Council of Nice assembled in the year 325, 
was composed of over three hundred bishops, and 
Constantine himself took part in its deliberations. 
The character of the men in this Council and the 
subsequent Council of Constantinople, which con- 
cluded the declaration of christian doctrine, was not 
such as to command our respect for their opinions or 
our faith in their decrees. Many of them are rep- 
resented by the best historians as turbulent, proud, 
resentful, flexible, obsequious, worthless, and cor- 
rupt men, whose ruling passions were the love of 



PROOFS FROM HISTORY. \§\ 

gold and the love of dispute. The emperor himself 
burned the libels which some of these ecclesiastical 
worthies presented against others, as having too 
plainly their origin in private animosities. Half 
pagan and soon afterwards the murderer of his own 
wife and child, this new imperial convert had to 
exert himself actively to soften the asperities of the 
partisan prelates, and effect a union of the most dis- 
cordant elements. 

What hideous caricatures of the disciples of Christ! 
What specimens of the successors of the apostles ! 
These Councils, constituted and acting in such a 
manner that no sane mind can believe the Comforter 
was present to guide them into the truth, promul- 
gated after months of violent discussion, the doctrine 
of the Trinity, which has continued to be to this 
day the pivotal article of christian faith. 

" From this period," says Milman, " we may date 
the introduction of rigorous articles of belief, which 
required the submissive assent of every mind to 
every letter and every word of an established creed ; 
and which raised the slightest heresy of opinion into 
a more fatal offence against God, and a more odious 
crime in the estimation of man, than the worst moral 
delinquency or the most flagrant deviation from the 
spirit of Christianity." 

The religious contests from this date " led," says 



152 THE END 0F THE WORLD. 

the same author, " to all the evils of human strife, 
hatred, persecution, and bloodshed ; a profoundly 
humiliating fact in the history of mankind ; and in 
the history of Christianity an epoch of complete rev- 
olution from its genuine spirit." 

Now the red horse and his rider appear upon the 
stage of history, and looking backwards, we can all 
see how he " took peace from the earth, and that 
they should kill one another, and there was given 
unto him a great sword. " The Nicene Council was 
the hideous egg out of which were hatched all the 
subsequent falsities, evils, and desolations of the 
Church, both Catholic and Protestant, and was the 
beginning of that end of the world which has come 
upon us. 

u We cannot be ignorant," says St. Hilary, " that 
since the Council of Nice we have done nothing but 
make creeds. And while we fight against w T ords, 
litigate about new questions, dispute about equivocal 
terms, complain of others that every one may make 
his own party triumph ; while we cannot agree, 
while we anathematize one another, there is hardly 
any one that adheres to Jesus Christ." 

The Council of Nice proclaimed the Father and 
the Son to be separate and distinct, although co-equal 
and co-substantial divine persons. The Council of 



PROOFS FROM HISTORY. \ 53 

Constantinople subsequently invested the Holy Ghost 
with the same distinct and incomprehensible person- 
ality. Thus was created the tritheism of the chris- 
tian Church. The leaders of orthodoxy have vainly 
exercised all their ingenuity and metaphysical sub- 
tlety to defend and explain this doctrine of a God- 
head in three persons. The final shelter is mystery ! 
mystery ! and the righteousness of a blind faith. 
"If the light within thee be darkness/' said the 
Lord, %i how great is that darkness !" 

Few have suspected and still fewer have hitherto 
comprehended the nature of the baneful and destruc- 
tive influence of this false doctrine, this first great 
" false Christ/' upon the subsequent faith and morals 
of the Church. It will be very easily seen, however, 
when it is properly presented from the stand-point 
of spiritual law. As all things, spiritual and na- 
tural, flow from God as a centre and repeat His image 
in an infinitude of forms, so all the truths of faith 
or the doctrines of religion flow from and group 
themselves around our central conception of the 
nature of God and of His relations to the human 
soul. 

Never can the word " person'' be applied without 
falsehood or blasphemy to the Divine Being, except 
to affirm that He is one in spirit and in person, " In 



15-4 THE END 0F THE WORLD. 

that day shall there be one Lord and His name one." 
(Zech. xiv. 9.) There is no metaphysical subtlety 
which can prevent the mind from conceiving of a 
person as an objective individual, nor of three per- 
sons as three objective individuals. There may be 
three offices, as Creator, Mediator, Comforter : there 
may be three modal manifestations of the same God, 
as Father, Son, and Holy Ghost ; but never under 
any circumstances can the same being exist as three 
persons. The mind instinctively rejects it, and no 
matter how much we attempt to compel our faith 
and accept the mystery, the invariable result is that 
our thoughts and affections are diverted and dis- 
tracted and directed successively, first to one and 
then to another, and then to a third of three equally 
divine persons or Gods. 

This is no unimportant question of terms and defi- 
nitions. It is a question of the fundamental truth 
in theology — the centre from which all others flow 
and around which all others move. Let us study 
the results of its falsification. 

The first dreadful effect of this proclamation of 
three persons in the Godhead was to separate God 
from Christ. God in Christ, one spirit in one per- 
son, was the divinity of the apostles. Christ was 
the person in whom God was manifested. Outside 



PROOFS FROM HISTORY. 155 

of Christ, God was incomprehensible, unthinkable. 
" No man knoweth the Father save the Son, and he 
to whom the Son will reveal Him." When and 
where did the Son ever reveal any such a being as 
the orthodox Father? Christ is himself the Father, 
Son, and Holy Ghost in one divine person — the one 
supreme and only object of worship. This is the 
central truth of theology; and with this truth all 
the teachings of the Word of God are in magnificent 
and eternal harmony. 

AVhen the Father was made a separate person, in- 
stead of being regarded as the in-dwelling spirit of 
Christ, he was invested, according to the ideas of 
that age, when Roman law prevailed, with truly 
pagan attributes. He was made a being of inflexi- 
ble justice, of inappeasable wrath against the sin- 
ner, inexorable until His vengeance was satisfied, 
demanding either the eternal misery of all His crea- 
tures in the fires of hell, or the sweet-smelling savor 
of the blood of His own Son upon the cross. In this 
monstrous being it is impossible to recognize the 
God who through Christ created all things; who "so 
loved the world that He gave His only begotten 
Son" to save it ; the God who in and through Christ 
felt every throb of human pity ; who taught His dis- 
ciples the divine principle of unlimited and uncon- 



156 THE END 0F THE WORLD. 

ditional forgiveness ; and who loved and prayed for 
His own miserable enemies to the last. This was the 
only Father which the Son has ever revealed to 
mankind. 

The God we pray to is the being whose spirit we 
absorb, and to whom we assimilate. All the hardness, 
meanness, cruelty, and ferocity of the persecuting 
spirit in Christendom arose from the worship of this 
imaginary God out of Christ, the hideous creation 
of the old Jewish and pagan imaginations. The 
establishment of this terrible phantom on the throne 
of the universe was a virtual rejection of God in 
Christ, who was the Alpha and the Omega, the Be- 
ginning and the End, the Almighty. 

The unity of the Godhead in the body and person 
of Jesus Christ (Colos. ii. 9) having been thus de- 
stroyed, the next inevitable step was to falsify the 
mission of Christ upon earth. The infinitely loving 
Son, differing in sentiment from the infinitely angry 
Father, is supposed to take upon himself the punish- 
ment of the sins of the world, and the satisfaction 
of the imaginary demands of divine justice. He 
submits, in the course of historical events, to be cru- 
cified by the Jews. His teachings, His miracles, 
His life, His example were all no doubt regarded as 
valuable and instructive, but in this scheme the shed- 



PROOFS FROM HISTORY. 157 

ding of His blood was the one thing needful. He 
might never have spoken a word, but if He died for 
us, the orthodox theory is satisfied. The sinner be- 
lieves He died in his stead; the Father is pacified, 
and for Christ's sake adopts the sinner as His child. 
The Holy Ghost then seals, purifies, guides, and 
saves him. 

This monstrous "scheme of redemption" is no- 
where taught in the Word of God, and has not the 
slightest support in the New Testament, except in 
the strained interpretation of a few isolated passages 
in the epistles. Had it been the truth, it would have 
been proclaimed clearly and boldly with argument 
and reiteration on the pages of evangelists and apos- 
tles. Where does the Lord Jesus, in all His dis- 
courses, parables, and heavenly sayings, give the 
faintest hint that He was employed on any such 
mission ? 

Compare this unnatural and irrational doctrine, 
which never could have arisen had God been re- 
garded as One Divine Being, with the simple and 
sublime truth of the mission of Jesus Christ as 
taught in the Scriptures. Emmanuel or " God with 
us" animated a human body, born of a virgin and 
known as the man Jesus Christ, for the loving pur- 
pose of saving His people from their sins. He never 

14 



158 THE END 0F THE WORLD. 

suffered the punishment of sin, which is eternal ban- 
ishment from God and all its painful consequences. 
He bore our sins (not the punishment of them) in 
His own body, so that by sharing and subduing 
all our temptations He might be able to take away 
our sins, and deliver us forever from their bondage 
and their effects. 

In other words, He took upon himself our evil 
human nature, derived from His mother by the laws 
of heredity, was tempted and suffered like ourselves, 
fought spiritually with all the powers of hell, " striv- 
ing against sin unto blood/' He thereby created 
for us in himself an infinitely regenerated human 
nature, the first-born in the mystery of the new birth, 
a Divine Humanity — a mediator between God and 
man, in which He ascended to heaven and beyond 
all the heavens, and in which He ever lives, possessed 
of all power in heaven and earth, and able to save to 
the uttermost those who believe in Him and pray to 
Him, not only by forgiving their sins, but by utterly 
extirpating the sinful nature from their characters. 
All this is clearly involved in the 17th chapter of 
John. 

The division of the Godhead into three persons, 
by falsifying the mission of Christ, externized the 
relation of God to the human soul. After that a 



PROOFS FROM HISTORY. 159 

judicial process was invented. The Father is the 
judge, the Son the advocate, the sinner the criminal. 
The sinner repents and believes, the Son pleads, the 
Father forgives, the Holy Ghost seals and adopts. 
This scheme utterly ignores the organic relationship 
which is established between Christ and the soul 
during the work of regeneration. It presumes a 
change of disposition on the part of God, and a 
miracle in turning an evil man into a good one with- 
out the operation of adequate causes. It forgets that 
the forgiveness of sin can make no change in the 
moral character, and that unless some genuine, or- 
ganic, spiritual revolution takes place, the forgiven 
man is just as wicked as he was before. 

See what really takes place in the work of regen- 
eration, in correspondence with the great truth, that 
God is one in spirit and in person, and a Being who 
never condemns or punishes, but who incarnated 
himself, not to save us from the punishment of sin, 
but to eradicate sin itself from our spiritual organ- 
izations. "When, drawn by the divine love, enlight- 
ened by the divine truth, convicted of sin and weary 
of self, we contemplate God in Christ, we see that 
Jesus is the Father, the supreme object of worship, 
the Saviour. We pray to Him directly, for whoso- 
ever seeth Him seeth the Father. We beg Him to 



160 THE END OF THE WORLD. 

forgive our sins for His own sake; we open our 
hearts in faith and love to His effluent spirit, which 
is the Holy Ghost. We receive from Him that 
power to overcome our evils which He acquired by 
overcoming the same evils in His own human life. 
We follow Him by faith and obedience in the regen- 
erative work which took place in His own human 
soul. We thus spiritually eat His flesh and drink 
His blood ; and are made partakers of His nature, 
joint-heirs of His conquest over sin ; and are finally 
united to Him in spirit according to the same laws 
and processes by which He was made absolutely one 
with the Father. Thus our life is "hid with Christ 
in God." This, dear readers, is Christ's plan of 
salvation ! 

This sensuous doctrine of a God in three persons 
proceeded still further to externize and debauch the 
truths of religion, until the Church and all its dog- 
mas became a mass of externalisms. The great spir- 
itual sacrifice of Christ became a mere physical exe- 
cution. The sacred word, blood, involving all that 
is meant by divine truth, sank to its lowest sensuous 
level of interpretation. The Word of God was no 
longer regarded spiritually but literally. The spir- 
itual world was separated from the natural and 
pushed afar off. The resurrection of the dead was 



PROOFS FROM HISTORY. \Q\ 

therefore only comprehended as a resuscitation of 
buried corpses. 

Even the body of Christ was a wafer in the hands 
of the priest. The Church, which is the kingdom 
of God in the soul, became a vast external institu- 
tion, which voted itself infallible, and which aspired 
to universal dominion over the souls and bodies of 
men. The religious life became externized. Forms 
and ceremonies grew into matters of great impor- 
tance. The Pharisee abounded. Men became whited 
sepulchres, clean without, foul within. They wished 
to be saved from the punishment of their sins, 
rather than from the power of sin. They invented 
external measures of salvation, unknown to the 
gospel; confession to priests, absolutions, fastings, 
penances, asceticisms, contributions to the church, 
masses for the dead, rituals and ceremonies innumer- 
able. So long may the external forms of a dead 
Church survive the utter destruction of the life of 
God in the soul, that there are brigands in Italy who 
never eat meat on Friday, and who devoutly invoke 
the benediction of their patron saints and the Holy 
Virgin on their expeditions of robbery and murder! 

Instead of attaining the divine possibilities which 
were at first within its reach, the Church of God 
receded further and further from the truth. It set 
I 14* 



162 THE END OF THE WORLD. 

aside the Word of God as the only true guide in 
spiritual matters and usurped its functions, filling its 
place all throughout the Greek and Roman com- 
munions with little prayer-books and missals gotten 
up by the clergy. The suppression of the Scriptures 
was for a thousand years a chief point in its policy. 
Not only were they withheld from the laity, but many 
of the priests never owned or even saw a Bible. 

What followed? Allying itself with the tem- 
poral power, and for a long time triumphing over it, 
the Church displayed all the evil effects of worldly 
ambition conjoined with the pride of spiritual do- 
minion. Denouncing its own enemies as the enemies 
of God, it ran a hideous career of persecution and ter- 
rorism, such as the world has seldom seen. And it is 
fearful to think that the most subtile and awful cruel- 
ties, at which our modern blood runs cold, were not 
only sanctioned and used, but actually invented, by the 
most pious and holy members of the clerical profes- 
sion ! And these were the successors of the apostles ! 

"The superstitions of Europe," says Buckle, "in- 
stead of being diminished by the spread of Chris- 
tianity, were only turned into a fresh channel. The 
new religion was corrupted by the old follies. The 
adoration of idols was succeeded by the adoration 
of saints ; the worship of the Virgin was substituted 
for the worship of Cybele; pagan ceremonies were 



PROOFS FROM HISTORY. J63 

established in christian churches. Not only the 
mummeries of idolatry but likewise its doctrines 
were quickly added and incorporated into the spirit 
of the new religion, until after the lapse of a few 
generations, Christianity exhibited so grotesque and 
hideous a form, that its best features were lost, and 
the lineaments of its earlier loveliness altogether 
destroyed." (Hist, of Civilization, vol. i. p. 188.) 

Lo, the ugly and greedy bear, which succeeded 
the lion in the vision of Daniel after his eagle's 
wings were plucked, appropriating into his own 
substance the flesh and bones of all other systems ! 

It is a most instructive fact that the power of 
propagating the faith by rational means was lost to 
the Church, after the authoritative declaration of its 
belief in a God in three persons. The Jew ceased 
to be converted. The Jew might be persuaded that 
Jehovah animated a human body born of a virgin, 
and lived upon earth as the man Jesus Christ, but 
his deep-rooted conviction of the unity of God made 
him repel the idea of three persons in the Godhead 
as a heathenish conception. The remaining pagans 
of Europe were compelled to come into the fold by 
the combined weight of civil, military, and spiritual 
authority. The Saxons were driven to the river 
banks and given the alternative of being baptized 
or drowned. This was typical of the manner in 



164 THE END OF TEE WORLD. 

which the Church for a long time after conducted 
its missionary affairs. The members gained were 
held to the communion by a discipline of iron, and 
where would be the Church of to-day, if the human 
mind could be suddenly delivered from the accumu- 
lated bondages of tradition, heredity, self-interest, and 
social pressure ! 

The oriental mind, essentially monotheistic, re- 
sisted the Trinitarian doctrine so successfully, that 
in a few centuries western Asia and northern Africa, 
the scenes of the greatest triumphs of the earlier dis- 
ciples, were almost entirely lost to the Church, and 
have never been regained. Mahomet found a har- 
vest ripe for his sickle. He and his successors con- 
quered half the world to his faith with marvellous 
rapidity, not only because he carried the sword in 
one hand, but because he carried in the other a doc- 
trine immeasurably more powerful than the sword, 
the absolute unity of God, one in spirit and in per- 
son. 

After the elevation of false Christs and false 
prophets to power in the Church, it became morally 
incapable and unfit to evangelize the world. Its 
conquests ceased in all directions. It has made no 
impression whatever on the vast realms of the Ma- 
hometan power. It has never penetrated deeper 



PROOFS FROM HISTORY. 165 

than the mere rind of the pagan world, except in 
America, where it acquired possession by the diaboli- 
cal massacre of the peaceful natives. Not the hun- 
dredth part of the enormous populations of India, 
China, Japan, and the interior of Africa has ever 
seen the face or heard the voice of the Christian mis- 
sionary. And so feeble has been the power of the 
corrupted Church to christianize its own members 
and to reconstruct society upon heavenly models, 
that we may safely regard it as a special work of 
divine providence, that the heathen peoples of the 
world have been protected from its invasion. They 
are the happy sheep who are not of this fold ; nor 
will they hear the voice of the hireling. 

A tree is always known by its fruits. If the theo- 
logical doctrines promulgated in the fourth century, 
and believed, as they were, with intense earnestness, 
had been the genuine teachings of the Word of God, 
they would have produced the legitimate and inevit- 
able effects of divine truth upon the heart and mind. 
They would have harmonized the discordant ele- 
ments in the Church. They would have fostered 
the life of God in the soul. They would have de- 
veloped the spirit of brotherly love to the point of 
universal toleration and charity. They would have 
continued to flood the minds of men with ever- 



166 THE END 0F TBE WORLD. 

increasing light as from heavenly fountains of wis- 
dom. They would have converted the world by their 
beauty and power, and long ere this, the kingdom 
of God would have been realized on earth. 

Remembering the spiritual laws, that the Church 
is the heart of the* world, that as the blood is, so are 
the organs, as the doctrines and life of the Church 
are, so is the type of civilization created around it ; 
let us examine the general condition of society in 
the Roman and Greek communions, for which the 
holy apostolic and catholic Church is responsible. 
The data are abundant. 

u When we remember," says Leckey, u that in the 
Byzantine empire the renovating power of theology 
was tried in a new capital, free from pagan tradi- 
tions, and for more than one thousand years unsub- 
dued by barbarians : and that in Rome, the Church 
for at least seven hundred years after the shock of 
the barbarians had subsided, exercised a control 
more absolute than any other moral or intellectual 
agency has ever attained, it will appear, I think, 
that the experiment was very sufficiently tried." 
(Hist. European Morals, vol. ii. page 17.) 

This is his estimate of the civilization produced 
by the Roman Church : 

" She exercised for many centuries an almost abso- 
lute empire over the thoughts and actions of man- 



PROOFS FROM HISTORY. \Q>J 

kind, and created a civilization, which was permeated 
in every part with ecclesiastical influence. And the 
dark ages, as the period of catholic ascendancy is 
justly called, do undoubtedly display many features 
of great and genuine excellence. In active benevo- 
lence, in the spirit of reverence, in loyalty, in co-op- 
erative habits, they far transcend the noblest ages 
of pagan antiquity, while in that humanity which 
shrinks from the infliction of suffering, they were 
superior to Eoman, and in their respect for chastity, 
to Greek civilization. On the other hand they rank 
immeasurably below the best pagan civilizations in 
civic and patriotic virtues, in the love of liberty, in 
the number and splendor of the great characters they 
produced, and in the dignity and beauty of the type 
of character they formed. They had their full share 
of tumult, anarchy, injustice, and war, and they 
should probably be placed, in all the intellectual 
virtues, lower than any other period in the history of 
mankind. A boundless intolerance of all divergence 
of opinion was united with an equally boundless 
toleration of falsehood and deliberate fraud that 
would favor received opinions. Credulity being 
taught as a virtue and all conclusions dictated by 
authority, a deadly torpor sank upon the human 
mind, which for many centuries almost suspended 
its action." (Vol. ii. pp. 15-16.) 

When we add to the above list, the political des- 
potisms and exactions of the Church,* the religious 



168 THE END OF THE WORLD. 

wars, the horrible torture of innumerable heretics, 
the sensualities of the clergy, and the generally low 
standard of public and private morals, we will see 
that Mr. Leckey's criticism is exceedingly lenient 
and even generous. " There is no sadder picture in 
history," said another great thinker, "than Rome 
under pagan domination, unless indeed it be Rome 
after she became christian." 

Let us now see what effect the doctrines of the 
Councils of Nice and Constantinople produced upon 
the Greek Church, as revealed in the influence of 
that Church upon the social and civil life of man. 

" The first christian emperor transferred his capi- 
tal to a new city uncontaminated by the traditions 
and the glories of paganism, and he there founded 
an empire which derived all its ethics from christian 
sources, and which continued in existence for about 
eleven hundred years. Of that Byzantine empire it 
is the universal verdict of history, that it constitutes 
without a single exception, the most thoroughly base 
and despicable form which civilization has yet as- 
sumed. Though very cruel and very sensual, there 
have been times when cruelty assumed more ruthless 
and sensuality more extravagant aspects, but there 
has been no other enduring civilization so absolutely 
destitute of all the forms and elements of greatness, 
and none to which the epithet mean may be so em- 
phatically applied. The Byzantine empire was pre- 



PROOFS FROM HISTORY. \Q§ 

eminently the age of treachery. Its vices were the 
vices of men who had ceased to be brave without 
learning to be virtuous. . . . The history of the em- 
pire is the monotonous story of the intrigues of 
priests, eunuchs, and women, of poisonings, of con- 
spiracies, of uniform ingratitude, of perpetual fratri- 
cides. ... At last the Mohammedan invasion termi- 
nated the long decrepitude of the eastern empire. 
Constantinople sank beneath the crescent, its inhabi- 
tants wrangling about theological differences to the 
moment of its fall." (Vol. ii. pp. 13-14.) 

The successors of the apostles acd the ministers 
of the infallible Church, which professed to be 
guided by the Comforter into all truth, had made 
such miserable christians of their flocks after a thou- 
sand years' instruction, that the very Turks who sub- 
dued them were contaminated and degraded by their 
contact. 

"Unfortunately," says an able writer in Black- 
wood (January, 1880), "a sufficiently large nomi- 
nally christian population was allowed by the Turks 
to remain in their newly acquired possessions to taint 
the conquering race. The vices of Byzantinism 
speedily made themselves felt in the body politic of 
Turkey. The subservient races, intensely super- 
stitious in the form of their religious belief, which 
had been degraded into a passport system, by which 
the believer in the efficacy of certain dogmas and 



170 THE END OF THE WORLD. 

ceremonials might attain heaven irrespective of his 
moral character upon earth, were unrestrained by 
religious principle from giving free rein to. their 
natural propensities, which were dishonest and cov- 
etous in the extreme. They thus revenged them- 
selves on their conquerors by undermining them 
financially, politically, and morally. They insidi- 
ously plundered those who were too indifferent to 
wealth to know how to preserve it, and infected 
others with the contagion of their own cupidity, 
until these became as vicious and corrupt in their 
means of acquiring riches as they were themselves. 
This process has been going on for the last five hun- 
dred years, until the fanaticism of the race, which 
was its best protection against an inverted Christi- 
anity, has begun to die out, and the governing class 
of Turks has with rare exceptions become as dis- 
honest and degraded as the christians they despise." 

Surely nothing more need be adduced to prove 
that the predictions of Christ have been verified; 
that false Christs and false prophets arose early in 
the Church, that they contaminated, persecuted, and 
destroyed the genuine truths of the gospel ; and that 
famines of spiritual truth, and pestilences of moral 
disease, and earthquakes of ecclesiastical disruption 
followed, while iniquity enormously increased and 
the true spirit of charity and brotherhood was al- 
most entirely destroyed. The eagle's wings had been 



PROOFS FROM HISTORY. \^\ 

plucked from the lion of the primitive Church, and 
the greedy bear with the bloody ribs between his 
teeth took its place. 

And yet there is light in the darkness. The oil 
and the wine are always tenderly preserved by divine 
providence. The kingdom of Christ and the divine 
dream of the apostles were not realized, but the 
living spirit of love, which still haunted the Church 
desecrated by false doctrines, worked out many be- 
neficent reforms in human society. The suppression 
of barbaric games and shows, the ransom of cap- 
tives, the abolition of the old forms of slavery, the 
organization of charities, the higher estimate of 
human life, the doctrine of the moral equality of 
men, the spiritual conception of duty, and the grand 
outburst of creative art under the inspirations of her 
genius, preserve the old Church of Rome from the 
contempt of mankind; and give us a faint concep- 
tion of what she might have been, and what she 
might have done to change the face of nature and 
the history of man, had she retained in their original 
strength and purity the doctrines of the apostles, and 
exhibited in her teachings and her life the spirit of 
the Father who dwelt in the body of Christ. 



CHAPTER VII. 

PROOFS FROM HISTORY {Continued). 

T)ROTESTANTS have imagined that the great 
"*" reaction against the Church of Rome, known 
as the Reformation, was a revival of true religion, 
and a restoration of primitive Christianity. They 
think also that almost everything, great, glorious, 
and progressive in modern times, has sprung directly 
or collaterally out of that religious movement. 

I have abundantly shown that nothing of this 
kind is predicted in the Word of God, but quite the 
reverse. In describing the spiritual states of His 
Church from His own time until His second coming, 
our Lord gives a terrible picture of steady decline, 
false Christs, false prophets, persecuted truths, in- 
iquity abounding, the loss of faith and love, tribula- 
tions, famines, pestilences, earthquakes of a moral 
character, even to the triumph of abominations in 
the holy places of the Church, yea, even to its death 
or extinction, and His appearance again in the clouds 
of heaven to save His remnant from utter destruc- 
tion. There is not a word or an image suggestive 
172 



PROOFS FROM HISTORY. J 73 

of any amendment, or revival, br of any brighter 
turn given to His Church from beginning to end. 

Again, in harmony with Christ's prediction, the 
spiritual sense of the vision of the four horses, which 
is so clear and beautiful, assigns with unerring pre- 
cision the rider on the black horse to the spirit and 
character of the protestant movement. It is equally 
clear that the protestant movement was represented 
by the four-headed leopard in the vision of Daniel. 
It was a declaration of the individual right to weigh, 
criticise, balance, and determine for one's self in all 
spiritual matters, followed by the cheapening of the 
bread of life or the degradation of moral standards, 
due to the invention of the false doctrines unknown 
to the Roman Church or to the gospel, salvation by 
faith alone, instantaneous conversion, and imputation 
of the righteousness of Christ. Protestantism stands 
properly as the black horse midway between the red, 
representing the corruption of Rome, and the pale 
horse, representing that utter denial of the Word of 
God which approaches. 

A great novelist of our times, George Macdonald, 
unwittingly traces the connection between the black 
and the pale horses in the following sentence : 

" I suspect that worse dishonesty and greater in- 
justice are to be found among the champions, lay 

15* 



174 THE END 0F THE WORLD. 

and cleric, of religious opinion, than in any other 
class. It is the vile falsehood and miserable unre- 
ality of christians, their faithlessness to their Master, 
their love of their own wretched sects, their world- 
liness and unchristianity, their talking and not doing, 
that has to answer, I believe, for the greater portion 
of our present atheism." 

The protestant movement was but one part, and 
by no means the most important part, of a general re- 
action against the Church of Rome. The insolence, 
tyranny, and extortion of the papal leaders had ex- 
cited a high degree of restlessness and rebellious feel- 
ing in many princes and potentates long before the 
time of Henry VIII. Their stupidity, ignorance, 
and persecution of all who engaged boldly in scien- 
tific pursuits and dared to express their opinions, had 
made enemies of the scholars, philosophers, and inde- 
pendent thinkers who secretly and slowly move the 
world. And the troubadours, the wandering bards 
of Europe, had satirized the vices of the priests and 
the terrorism of their false doctrines, hundreds of 
years before the sale of indulgences and the wicked- 
ness of the clergy excited the indignation of Martin 
Luther. 

" The long discussions," says Comte, " of the four- 
teenth century about the civil power of the popes, 



PROOFS FROM HISTORY. 175 

and that of the following century about the inde- 
pendence of the national churches, had occasioned a 
large spontaneous exercise of the right of free in- 
quiry, long before that right was set up in dogmatic 
form ; and the Lutheran proclamation of the dogma 
was a mere extension to the christian public of a 
privilege which had been abundantly used by kings 
and scholars. The Lutheran revolution produced 
no innovation in regard to discipline, ecclesiastical 
orders, or dogma that had not been perseveringly 
proposed long before ; so that the success of Luther, 
after the failure of various premature reformers, was 
mainly due to the ripeness of the time." 

The greatest motor powers in the development 
of modern civilization, as distinguished from that 
of mediaeval Christianity, were derived, strangely 
enough, from pagan sources. Modern thought may 
be truly said to have been awakened from the torpor 
of ages by the revival of the ancient literatures of 
Greece and Rome, and by contact with the superior 
civilization of the Saracen empires. The torch of 
christian science was kindled at the fire of Arabic 
learning. The Mahometans were the originators of 
chemistry, the inventors of algebra, the first promul- 
gators of observation and experiment as the true in- 
struments for the study of nature, and had many 
great libraries and institutions of learning, in which 



176 THE END OF THE WORLD. 

they taught astronomy, medicine, philosophy, and all 
the arts and sciences ; anticipating even our modern 
doctrines of evolution and development; while the 
christians of Europe were still steeped in a night of 
comparative ignorance and darkness. 

So great is the despotism of ecclesiastical discipline 
in paralyzing the thinking faculties, that these great 
influences made little or no impression on the monk- 
ish mind of the Church. The lay mind of Europe, 
however, roused into new activity by them, and 
reacting against the despotisms and corruptions of 
the christian clergy, was quietly but powerfully 
drawn into a state of antagonism to the faith and 
pretensions of the Romish hierarchy. The destruc- 
tion of the feudal system, the rise of a great com- 
mercial and industrial middle class, the growth of 
free cities, and the gradual advancement of new arts 
and sciences laid a solid foundation for a new order 
of things. Three discoveries in science alone, gun- 
powder, printing, and the mariner's compass (from 
which followed America), did more to change the 
face of the world than all the religious revolutions 
of modern times. Now all these things had been 
accomplished ; the spirit of liberty, the scepticism of 
science, the rationalism of free thought were all born 
and striving in the human breast before the protest- 



PROOFS FROM HISTORY. 177 

ant Reformation was inaugurated. The Reformation 
indeed only took place because the religious sphere 
of life and thought felt the stimulus and caught the 
general reactionary spirit of the age. 

A true religion with a true spiritual philosophy of 
mind and matter, will find itself in perfect organic 
harmony and correlation with all the arts and 
sciences and all the demands of the rational faculty. 
There is no correspondence between a true religion 
and false science, or between a false religion and true 
science. They cannot be made to cohere or amalga- 
mate. Rationalism and scientism should spring up 
spontaneously in the pathway of the religious idea as 
its legitimate products and supports. The fact that 
these great forces have been awakened by foreign 
stimuli, and stand in antagonism to the fundamental 
doctrines of the Church, is presumptive evidence that 
those doctrines are false, and at war with the great 
spiritual influences which secretly mould the life and 
determine the progress of humanity. 

Individualism, the revolt of the individual soul 
against the despotisms of church and state, is the 
reformatory spirit of modern Europe. Its political 
embodiment is seen in the revolutions of England, 
France, and America, in the attainment of constitu- 
tional rights, in the emancipation of the peoples. 



178 THE END OF THE WORLD. 

Its intellectual embodiment is seen in the rise of the 
critical spirit, the free development of science, the 
apotheosis of reason, conceptions but vaguely known 
to antiquity, and utterly crushed by the catholic 
domination. Its religious embodiment was seen in 
the Reformation, and the numerous disintegrations 
of christian faith which have followed that event. 

The theological reformation has gone along side 
by side but not hand in hand with the great social, 
political, and intellectual changes of modern times. 
The former was altogether a feebler and shallower 
movement than the latter. Casting away the forms 
of Romanism, the protestants have never emanci- 
pated themselves from the ecclesiastical spirit of 
Rome. They have persecuted wherever they could, 
and every sect is to-day singularly intolerant of any 
interpretation of the Word of God but its own. 
Their toleration is the forced product of their con- 
tact with rationalism and scientism* The Puritan 
share in the great modern fight for freedom of 
opinion was limited to a fight for their own religious 
freedom, which afterwards they were often unwill- 
ing to accord to others. The liberation of modern 
thought is indeed largely due to the general weaken- 
ing of all ecclesiastical power by the numerous dis- 
integrations in the protestant churches. 



PROOFS FROM HISTORY. 179 

So late as 1648, according to Neal's History of the 
Puritans, the Presbyterians tried to induce the par- 
liament to pass a law, by which any one who persist- 
ently taught anything contrary to the main proposi- 
tions comprised in their doctrine of the Trinity and 
the Incarnation should be punished with death ! and 
all who taught popish, armenian, antinomian, baptist, 
or quaker doctrines should be imprisoned for life ! 

"The Church/' says Guizot, "has always sided 
with despotism." The great march of modern 
progress is altogether independent of Protestantism 
as a creed, although protestants have joined it and 
aided it, and protestants and catholics have alike 
benefited by it. It is surprising to see that the most 
earnest apostles of liberty have been Voltaire, Rous- 
seau, Tom Paine, Franklin, Jefferson, Adams, and 
innumerable other deists and infidels. Nor have 
protestants any less dislike and distrust of the en- 
croachments of scientism than the most bigoted cath- 
olics. There is no conflict between true science and 
true religion, but there is an irrepressible conflict 
between reason and science, and that vast doctrinal 
superstructure which has been erected by religionists 
upon an exclusively literal interpretation of the 
Word of God. So long as that literal interpretation 
is insisted upon, the old mediaeval spirit lies con- 



180 THE END 0F THE WORLD. 

cealed under the suavities of modern life, the policy 
of ignoring unpleasant truths, feeble attempts at re- 
adjustments of doctrine, and "a toleration which is 
only the equilibrium of intolerances." 

Whatever aid and comfort protestants have given 
to rationalism and scientism has been instigated by 
their common hatred of the old mother-church of 
Rome, and has not sprung from the fact that their 
own interpretations of the Scriptures are any more 
in accordance with reason and science. The protest- 
ant movement cut off many pagan excrescences which 
had accumulated about the catholic Church, re- 
formed many abuses, and asserted the rights of the 
individual, for all of which it deserves our thanks, 
but it left standing the old evil theological root, the 
doctrine of a God in three persons, whence all its 
woes. 

The utter failure of the catholic Church to realize 
the kingdom of heaven upon earth, was due to this 
old false theological dogma, from which all its other 
false doctrines, and all its ecclesiastical and social 
corruptions sprang as from a bitter and poisonous 
root. The protestant Church, lopping off almost 
all else, retained this evil root, and would by natural 
laws have reproduced all the errors and follies of 
Catholicism, and repeated its whole history, but for 



PROOFS FROM HISTORY, Jgl 

the total change of circumstances, and its different 
civil and social surroundings. It had to contend 
with rationalism and scientism instead of Judaism 
and paganism, and it bears many marks of conflict 
nnd compromise with its powerful enemies. And 
fortunately for mankind, its own doctrine of the 
right of private interpretation prevented the rise of 
any great, central, overshadowing hierarchy like that 
of Rome. 

If protestant countries have enjoyed greater spir- 
itual light than catholic countries, it is not on account 
of the truth of protestant doctrines, but because the 
Word of God has been more freely distributed among 
the people. This makes the difference between 
Christendom and heathendom. The Word of God 
without the mediation of Churches or clergy, and 
indeed much better without than with it, brings the 
mind of the reader into rapport with spiritual and 
enlightening* influences utterly unknown to the world. 
The Bible by its own interior light has illuminated 
the Church in a measure, in spite of the false construc- 
tions put upon it by both protestants and catholics. 

In the light of spiritual truth, however, Protest- 
antism was a downward movement of the Church, 
a still further declension from the true faith of the 
gospel and the genuine life of Christ in the soul. 

16 



182 THE END OF THE WORLD. 

This was effected by its setting up two great false 
doctrines, false Christs, in addition to those already- 
believed, doctrines which have had a more baleful 
influence on the spiritual life of the modern world, 
than the worship of saints and relics or any other 
monstrosity of catholic faith. These doctrines are 
the dogma of salvation by faith alone, and the dogma 
of the instantaneous purification of the soul by ac- 
cepting the so-called terms of the gospel. 

Many catholics utterly repudiate the doctrines of 
predestination, justification by faith alone, and the 
imputed righteousness of Christ. They say, more- 
over, that the doctrine of the vicarious suffering of 
our Lord was a pure invention of protestants, having 
been utterly unknown in apostolic or catholic teach- 
ings. The work of Baring-Gould, a most enlight- 
ened catholic, on the Origin and Development of 
Religion, is my authority for this statement. These 
doctrines therefore are fresh, protestant outshoots 
from the old evil root of a Divine Being in three 
separate and distinct persons, with three separate and 
distinct offices. 

Protestants may deny, protest, explain, and qualify 
as they please, but the stubborn fact remains, that 
if you teach a man that whenever he comes to God 
the Father, and pleads in faith the merits of Jesus 



PROOFS FROM HISTORY. 183 

Christ, a miraculous change is wrought upon his 
soul, the righteousness of Christ being imputed to 
him as his own, you have given him a moral ano- 
dyne of the most powerful and fatal character. You 
have separated religion entirely from his daily busi- 
ness. No subsequent appeals to his moral sense, 
however eloquent or beautiful, may be able to rouse 
him from his stupor to a true sense of the spiritual 
interests which are embodied in his daily actions. 
Evil has no repulsions, hell has no terrors to one 
who has the magic pass- words into heaven, " Believe 
and be saved," ringing in his ears. This is a prom- 
inent cause of the indifference of the sinner, the 
worldliness of the christian, and the deadness of the 
Church. The professor of religion is at ease in 
Zion, the unrepentant puts off to a more convenient 
season. 

These fatal doctrines destroy all true conception 
of the growth of christian character, the life-long 
struggle with sin, the daily walk with Christ, the 
" conversation in heaven," the gradual appropriation 
of the flesh and blood of the Divine Man until we 
become conquerors over sin and partakers of the 
divine nature. Even if these things were under- 
stood and felt by the clergy, and faithfully pleaded 
from the pulpit, they would fall with logical cold- 



184 THE END OF THE WORLD. 

ness upon deaf ears and obdurate hearts. "A 
measure of wheat for a penny, and three measures 
of barley for a penny," is the cry. Why toil along 
the hard paths of self-denial and self-sacrifice, when 
the terms of salvation, couched in an eternal "now/' 
are so easy, the instantaneous change of heart so 
certain and thorough, the acceptance by the Father 
so sure ? 

" Protestantism," says the sagacious and disinter- 
ested Comte, "must be charged with having seriously 
impaired the fundamental principles of morality, 
both domestic and social, which Catholicism had es- 
tablished. It was a sound observation of Hume, 
that the Lutheran revolution was aided by the pas- 
sions of ecclesiastics who desired a release from celi- 
bacy, and the rapacity of nobles who coveted the 
territorial possessions of the clergy ; and it was a 
necessary consequence of the lowered position of the 
moral authority, that it lost the power, and even the 
will, to sustain the inviolability of the most ele- 
mentary rules of morality against the attacks of the 
critical spirit. I need only point out the permission 
of divorce, the relaxation of rules about the mar- 
riage of relations; and as a decisive instance, the 
disgraceful dogmatic consultation by which the chiefs 
of Protestantism, with Luther at their head, solemnly 
authorized bigamy in the case of a German prince ; 
and again, the accommodating temper of the founders 



PROOFS FROM HISTORY. Jg5 

of the English Church toward the shocking weak- 
nesses of their strange national pope, Henry VIII." 

From such beginnings what end might be ration- 
ally expected? — from such seed, what fruit? 

"If Lutheranism and Calvinism/' says Baring- 
Gould/ "have not led, wherever they have been 
embraced, to a general dissolution of morals, this is 
due to the fragments of positive truth which they 
have retained, and to the fact that men are often 
better than their profession, and that none are rigidly 
consequent in what they do to the principles they 
claim as their guides." 

The earlier reformers and our good puritan fathers 
endeavored to prevent that laxity of morals which 
their doctrines appeared to invite, by the utmost 
rigidity of church and family discipline. All in 
vain. Their faith, their piety, their self-sacrifice, 
their love never exceeded and not always attained 
the best catholic levels. And to this day the aver- 
age catholic is more unquestioning in his faith, more 
conscientiously devoted to his Church, more liberal 
in its support, and more self-denying in the per- 
formance of what he considers his religious duties 
than the average protestant. 

But let us not mistake the outward manifestations 
of religiosity in either Church for genuine religion, 

16* 



186 THE END OF THE WORLD. 

The influence of church teachings in the production 
of a virtuous life in our own age has been grossly 
overrated. Men abstain from out-breaking sins, 
murder, theft, adultery, drunkenness, gambling, etc., 
from fear of the law, from social pressure, from 
pride, self-esteem, love of approbation, the fear or 
respect of others, self-interest, and from a general 
degree of culture and mental elevation dependent 
upon fortunate surroundings. 

It is exceedingly difficult for us to believe that 
religious truth withholds the church member from 
these great evils, when we see it unable to deliver 
him from smaller and feebler frailties. When we 
behold him indifferent to his wife, neglectful of his 
children, imperious to his servants, exacting towards 
his inferiors, unjust to his neighbor, forgetful of his 
obligations, and showing in his daily walk, conver- 
sation, and temper all the sharpness, covetousness, 
and selfishness of the world ; although he keeps the 
Sabbath, abstains from swearing, cards, dancing, and 
the theatre, and is prominent in the Church, we are 
confident that he knows nothing whatever of that 
new birth, which is the birth of Christ in the soul. 

This lowering of the standard of christian life, 
consequent upon the cheap and easy plan of salva- 
tion offered to the sinner, was due to that darkening 



PROOFS FROM HISTORY. J87 

of gospel truth which is represented by the black 
horse and his rider. The rider upon the red horse 
interpreted the Word of God to suit his own self- 
interests, and to secure a monopoly of its benefits, he 
lodged the interpretation exclusively in his own 
councils. The rider on the black horse asserts his 
individual right of interpretation, displays his pair 
of balances, and proceeds to weigh, scrutinize, and 
determine the value of spiritual truth according to 
his own, self-created, rational, or irrational standards 
of thought. 

In the interpretation of the Word of God the 
protestant occupied no stand-point superior to that 
of the catholic. He had no opening of his spiritual 
senses, no revealing or confirming light from heaven. 
He received the Bible on the literal basis already 
established. He only repudiated the claim of the 
Church to dogmatize for him, and proceeded to dog- 
matize for himself. And in rejecting the beautiful 
symbolisms of the catholic Church, which kept alive 
in the minds of men the great central idea of the 
Word of God, that spiritual and invisible things are 
contained within corresponding natural forms, he 
lost what little spiritual light the catholic had re- 
tained, and sank to an utterly gross and literal inter- 
pretation of the Scriptures. This accounts for the 



188 THE END 0F THE WORLD. 

strong Judaic spirit of the reformers and the fact 
that the Father in that Church is more distinctly 
than in the catholic Church, the Jehovah of- the 
Jews, and not the Father who was revealed to man- 
kind in the loving, suffering, humble, and forgiving 
spirit of Jesus Christ. 

No one can rise permanently above the level of 
his faith. The average life of the modern Jew is 
the product of his literal interpretation of the Old 
Testament. The average life of the modern chris- 
tian is the product of his literal interpretations of 
the entire Word. The heavenly life of the New 
Jerusalem which is coming, will be the product of 
the spiritual interpretations of the Scriptures. The 
Word contains the divine life, and is powerful in all 
its degrees. The Jewish people and religion have 
proved indestructible, because the basis of their faith 
was the Word of God. Neither Jew nor christian 
has more than touched the hem of the divine gar- 
ment. They receive the divine life and aspire to 
utilize it, but they do it very feebly and imperfectly, 
on account of their falsification or corrupt interpre- 
tation of the truth. 

George Macdonald, the most religious novelist of 
the century, gives the following admirable descrip- 
tion of the adulterated " bread of life" which is 



PROOFS FROM HISTORY. 189 

usually dispensed to the congregations in modern 
churches : 

" Bread ! Yes, I honestly think it might be called 
bread which Walter Drake had ministered. It had 
not been free from chalk or potatoes : bits of shell 
and peel might have been found in it, with an occa- 
sional piece of dirt or a hair or two; yes, even a 
little alum, and that is bad, for it tends to destroy, 
not satisfy the hunger. There was besides saw T dust 
in it, and parchment-dust and lumber-dust ; it was 
ill-salted, badly baked, and sodden ; sometimes it 
was blue-mouldy, and sometimes even maggotty, but 
the mass of it was honest flour, and those who did 
not recoil from the look of it, or recognize the 
presence of the variety of foreign matter, could live 
upon it, in a sense, up to a certain pitch of life. 

"But a great deal was not of his baking at all. 
He had been merely the distributor, crumbling down 
other bakers' loaves and making them up again in 
his own shapes. In his congregation, however, were 
many who not only preferred bad bread of certain 
kinds, but were incapable of digesting any of good 
quality." 

Under this light satire lies the most awful truth 
of modern times, that the adulterations of the Word 
of God have rendered the genuine christian life im- 
practicable in the w r orld, for w r e are what we feed 
upon, and false doctrines beget false lives. Nor have 



190 THE END OF THE WORLD. 

the critical and exegetical labors of Protestantism in 
the interpretation of the Bible mended matters. 
Honestly and zealously in pursuit of truth, the 
reformers made the darkness more apparent and the 
confusion worse confounded. Adhering as closely 
as possible to the apparent meaning of the letter, 
their successors have been unable to be reconciled 
with each other, or to meet the arguments of scien- 
tists and rationalists against the truth of revealed 
religion. 

The consequence is that skepticism and rational- 
ism have permeated the Church itself to an alarming 
extent. Genuine and absolute faith in the plenary 
inspiration of the Scriptures has been terribly shaken, 
and in many christian minds absolutely lost. The 
last, perfected and logical product of protestant exe- 
gesis is a book called u The Bible for Learners," a 
book written by Lutheran clergymen, and reducing 
the Word of God to the level of Greek and Eoman 
history, denying its inspiration, scouting its miracles 
as myth and fable, and utterly emasculating it of 
every divine element. No matter what temporary 
resistance good men may make, such is the inevitable 
result of protestant teachings and methods. What 
can possibly follow, but the pale horse and his rider 
Death? 



PROOFS FROM HISTORY. \§\ 

"In the philosophical survey of religions," says 
Frederick Harrison, " Protestantism no longer exists. 
It is not in the field ; it is a mere historical expres- 
sion ; it is no longer one of the competing creeds any 
more than Judaism or Arianism. Amongst the 
religious movements that claim the future of the 
world it has no locus standi. It is the parasite of 
Catholicism, and it must perish before the final ex- 
haustion of the system it has helped to kill. Protest- 
antism has now nothing that Catholicism has not 
got in far larger measure, and it has deliberately 
rejected very much of value that Catholicism has. 
Every protestant hero, book, or achievement could 
be easily matched by ten better from the catholic 
record." 

The protestants did nothing to correct the false 
idea the catholics had formed of the Supreme Being, 
but on the contrary, drew a picture of Him darker 
and more false than that of their predecessors. From 
this fact the whole system may be judged. Jonathan 
Edwards was one of the most learned, pious, logi- 
cal, and admired specimens of the protestant type. 
Oliver Wendell Holmes, in a recent article upon the 
man and his writings, makes the following remarks, 
which embody the verdict which mankind will here- 
after assuredly pass upon the whole school of re- 
ligious thought to which Edwards belonged : 



192 THE END OF THE WORLD. 

" There is no sufficient reason for attacking the 
motives of a man so saintly in life, so holy in aspi- 
rations, so patient, so meek, so laborious, so thor- 
oughly in earnest in the work to which his life was 
given. But after long smothering in the sulphurous 
atmosphere of his thought, one cannot help asking, 
1 Was this, or anything like this ? is this, or any- 
thing like this, the accepted belief of any consider- 
able part of Protestantism V If so, we must say 
with Bacon, i It were better to have no opinion of 
God at all than such an opinion as is unworthy of 
Him/ A ' natural man' is better than such an un- 
natural theologian. It is less violence to our nature 
to deify protoplasm than it is to diabolize the Deity " 

From all that has been said we can see why prot- 
estant countries are more intelligent and progressive 
than catholic countries, without assuming that the 
protestant religion is nearer to the divine truth than 
the catholic religion. By its praiseworthy opposi- 
tion to the hierarchy of Rome, Protestantism became 
an involved part of a movement greater and broader 
than itself, a movement which it did not cause, which 
it could not resist, and to which it has given no es- 
sential aid. Freedom of thought, freedom of speech, 
freedom of action, and the consequent activities of 
arts, sciences, industries, liberty, and commerce, have 
more especially benefited protestant countries, not 



PROOFS FROM HISTORY. J 93 

because the protestant religion was friendly to reason 
or science, but because there was no vast overshadow- 
ing hierarchy to suppress their movements or crush 
them out of existence. We have been more indebted 
to the absence of Rome than to the presence of 
Geneva. 

The following estimate of Protestantism made by 
one of the leaders of the positive school, will be 
appreciated by all intelligent minds who have extri- 
cated themselves from the bondage of protestant 
authority, and have learned how to think outside 
of the prescribed circles of protestant thought : 

a The violations of sense, history, and human 
nature are quite as enormous as those of the cath- 
olic Church. And with all this it has rooted out 
of Christianity almost everything that was left to it 
of the beautiful, sympathetic, human, and social, 
substituting for it all fierce, dry, disputatious for- 
mulas. Socially it is even more powerless than Ca- 
tholicism. As an influence to mediate between 
classes, or races, or institutions, it is utterly null. It 
is a dividing, anti-social, dehumanizing influence. 
Wherever it appears the power of the mother, and 
of the Woman, the perpetuity of marriage, gener- 
osity towards the weak, diminish. Its triumphs are 
towards divorce, personal lawlessness, and industrial 
selfishness. In the name of God and the blood of 
Christ, it everywhere teaches the gospel of minding 
1 n 17 



194 THE END OF THE WORLD. 

one's self, saving one's soul, and in the mean time 
making the most of the world. It has no claims, 
no raison d'etre, hardly any history, and certainly no 
future. The protestant volcano has long been ex- 
tinct, with here and there a few fumes of the buried 
fire." 

The evidence accumulated from the present state 
of society, from the Scriptures, and from history, and 
which might be indefinitely enlarged, is sufficient 
to prove that the Roman Catholic and Protestant 
Churches are equally degenerate and corrupt, and 
although having a name to live are spiritually dead. 
The Roman declares the Protestant Church apostate; 
the Protestant declares the Roman Church apostate; 
the spiritual sense of the Word of God declares 
them both apostate. Neither can be induced to be- 
lieve the truth ; the catholic planting himself upon 
his foregone conclusion that the Church is infalli- 
ble and cannot err; the protestant planting himself 
upon an equally false foregone conclusion, that the 
Reformation was a genuine restoration of primitive 
Christianity. Our Lord has come upon them, as He 
predicted, like a thief in the night and finds them 
sleeping and incredulous, unprepared and unbe- 
lieving ; nominally christian, practically heathen. 

The appearance of the rider upon the pale horse 



PROOFS FROM HISTORY. J 95 

is not only serially but logically consecutive to the 
appearance of the riders upon the red and the black 
horses. So is the "terrible beast" of Daniel the 
logical sequence of the bear and the leopard. When 
the truths of religion are so falsified that they be- 
come inoperative in the daily conduct of life, the 
denial of the Word of God and the rejection of all 
truth are imminent. This godless, bibleless era is 
upon us, and the dead Churches which have caused 
it, can do nothing to arrest its destructive progress. 
Its four dreadful symbols, the sword, hunger, death, 
and the wild beast, coexist already throughout Chris- 
tendom. The sword of falsehood, the hunger for 
sinful pleasures, the death to all spiritual aspirations, 
and all the base and brutal elements of life are ram- 
pant on every side ; and mostly and most shamelessly 
in all the great cities, the mighty centres of our 
boasted civilization, and the points where the greatest 
strength, talent, wealth, and power of the christian 
churches are concentrated. 

What is to hinder this vast irreligious power from 
growing and spreading and overshadowing the 
world ? It will be aided by scientism and rational- 
ism, divorced as they are from the christian religion. 
It will be aided by the general spirit of liberty de- 
generating into license, for the chick of the demo- 



196 THE END 0F THE WORLD. 

cratic egg will turn out to be King Mob. It will 
be aided by the labor-saving machinery and indus- 
trial developments of the age, which will enable the 
rich to monopolize the wealth of the world. It will 
be aided by the restless spirits of socialism, nihilism, 
a Christless spiritism, and by the dreaded commune 
which is secretly brewing and organizing everywhere. 
It will be aided and developed exactly in proportion 
as governments, society, and the Church are mam- 
mon ized, and every one can see that evil process is 
going on with steadily increasing rapidity. 

This state is the " great and terrible beast/' 
"strong exceedingly," with iron teeth and nails of 
brass, that stamped all previous systems of religion 
underfoot, blasphemed the name of the Most High, 
and worried the saints with the most fearful persecu- 
tions. 

The scientists and rationalists can oppose nothing 
against our impending doom but the cheap morali- 
ties and charities of a utilitarian naturalism. Aware 
of the danger and hopeful of some help outside of 
Christianity, Herbert Spencer, the high-priest of 
social evolution, exclaims : " The establishment of 
rules of right conduct on a scientific basis is a press- 
ing need. Now that moral injunctions are losing 
the authority given by their supposed sacred origin, 



PROOFS FROM HISTORY. J97 

the secularization of morals is becoming impera- 
tive." (Data of Ethics, Preface, p. 6.) 

It is not necessary in this place to criticise the 
doctrines of evolution and development as applied 
to the moral . nature of man. The scientists have 
not obtained one-half the facts, so long as they 
ignore the spiritual elements of life, which are 
always the chief factors in every organizing pro- 
cess. Discarding the spiritual forces which have de- 
termined outward events, they can give no good 
reason why the natural evolution of morals should 
not have gone steadily onwards from the beginning 
of the world until now. Nor can they explain the 
enormous gaps which are found in that theory, nor 
the long-continued eras of deterioration and degra- 
dation of conduct which mark the history of man. 
And no mechanical and molecular view of life can 
ever account for the rapid, radical, and permanent 
revolution in conduct and character which we fre- 
quently see produced by the religion of Christ. 

" To talk," says Frederic Harrison, himself a posi- 
tivist, " of science, enlightenment, and the like as 
capable of solving all human difficulties is an idle 
sophism. The multitude of detached researches on 
physical problems, the encyclopaedia of special in- 
quiries into nature, which calls itself science, is as 

17* 



198 THE END OF THE WORLD. 

powerless to insure man a complete and worthy life 
as chemistry would be powerless to guarantee the 
conditions of a happy marriage or of a great epic 
poem." 

We may rest secure in the belief that no system 
of religion or morals, however scientific and philo- 
sophical it may appear, which does not recognize the 
inspiration of the Word of God and the divine mis- 
sion of Jesus Christ, can ever be anything more 
than an ephemeral toy of the human imagination. 
It never could afford any but the feeblest barrier 
against the fiery lusts and stormy passions of the 
human heart. The so-called religion of humanity 
would indeed reduce us to a lower level than that 
now occupied by any heathen people, for the feeble 
moral life they exhibit is the still surviving embers 
of ancient revelations from heaven. Take the Word 
of God permanently and totally from us and we are 
stripped of all. Death and Hell inevitably follow. 

Forecasting the drama of the future, many acute 
minds have realized the fact that the old issues, 
political and social, are dead or dying, and that the 
contest between capital and labor, between money 
and work, the rich and the poor, imperialism and 
socialism, the governors and the governed, is to be 
the great conflict of the coming generations. This 



PROOFS FROM HISTORY. 199 

involves some total reconstruction in all the existing 
forms of society. It will be the crisis of the race 
when the two social extremes of selfishness confront 
each other for the last and final battle. It will be 
no heroic contest between good and evil, between 
right and wrong, between liberty and despotism. 
From that battle-field we might expect the truth to 
rise triumphant and peace to bless the world. It 
will be the mad collision of conflicting interests, of 
hatreds, animosities, jealousies, and evil tempers, the 
infernal riot of self-love, the pandemonium of men 
emancipated from all the conservative and control- 
ling influences of government and religion. 

The organized selfishness of accumulated capital, 
its exactions, its heartlessness, its inordinate greed, its 
tendency to absolute despotism are matters of com- 
mon observation and of philanthropic dread. Every 
discovery in science feeds its already enormous power, 
and it grows by w T hat it feeds upon. " The huge en- 
gines of civilization, with their immense wealth-pro- 
ducing power, monopolized in the services of those 
already powerful, will be made use of, if possible, 
to grind the faces of the poor as never before. The 
great issue will loom up, Shall the huge proprietors 
in every land combine in a universal alliance, sub- 
jecting to their united power the labor of the world?" 



200 THE END OF THE WORLD 

What will arrest the destructive progress of this 
iron-hearted monster, this pagan god Mammon, who 
aspires to the absolute rulership of our modern life? 
Will the scientific humanitarian convince him that 
charity, justice, mercy, brotherhood, and a generous 
division of profits among all who have labored are 
demanded by the natural evolution of morals ? Will 
the Church soften him by the sweet maxim of the 
golden rule, or the heavenly words of Jesus : " Lay 
not up for yourselves treasures upon earth" ; u Sell 
all that thou hast and give to the poor," etc. ? Has 
the tiger a sense of justice, or the serpent a sentiment 
of pity? Alas ! ere this gigantic despot has clutched 
the throat of mankind, he will have bribed, subsi- 
dized, or controlled, directly or indirectly, the gov- 
ernments, the legislatures, the corporations, the insti- 
tutions of the world, the press, the army, the Church 
itself! 

What of the down-trodden, suffering, toiling, hun- 
gry, homeless, laboring classes who cry for liberty, 
equality, fraternity ? Will they not rise in that 
awful might, of which they are still unconscious, 
and crush out tyrannies, restore equilibrium, rectify 
abuses, and organize the glorious brotherhood and 
solidarity of the free ? Alas, for the neglected oppor- 
tunities, the false teachings, the vanity, the hypocrisy, 



PROOFS FROM HISTORY. 201 

the powerlessness of the christian Church ! the heart 
of Labor is as cruel, as selfish, as sensual as the heart 
of Capital. Exploring the spiritual quality of the 
laboring classes and the dangerous classes of Christ- 
endom, one may see capacities for organized crime 
sufficient to sweep away the civilization of the globe. 

" Ages of suppressed hatred," says a great thinker, 
" not of evil, for that has been loved, but of indi- 
viduals and classes, simply because better circum- 
stanced in life; ages of wishes that were murders, 
and hopes that were rebellions ; ages of petty com- 
petitions, fraternal jealousies, and treadings-down and 
stampings-out of the class just below them, that they 
might force their way up into the class just above; 
ages of fierce, wolf-like hungers, ravenous appetites 
for power and pleasure, for dignity and despotic 
rule, and the sweet luxury of enslaving others, — all 
these things, tier upon tier, lie packed and folded 
away in their ancestral cells." 

These hideous forces have always existed, and have 
always contended for supremacy, under various forms 
and different circumstances, for they represent the 
irreconcilable antagonisms of human selfishness, and 
their history has been written in the tears and blood 
of the race. But they have been hitherto held in 
check by the strength of governments and the spirit- 
ual forces of religion. Now that governments are 



202 the END 0F T1IE would. 

being weakened and demoralized, and religion cor- 
rupted and sensualized, the mind is appalled 4 \vhen 
it contemplates the civil and social chaos which must 
inevitably result. Then will come the time when 
"all the tribes of the earth shall mourn," when the 
powers of heaven shall be shaken, and the tribula- 
tion shall be such as never was witnessed before and 
shall never be witnessed again. 

What shall deliver us from the sans-culottism of 
Paris, the nihilism of Russia, the commune of the 
devil, which are surely approaching? Who shall 
save us from that Hell which follows the rider upon 
the pale horse? " Except those days should be short- 
ened," said the Lord, "there should no flesh be 
saved." If the reader could know how those days 
shall be shortened, and how we shall be saved, let 
him patiently study the following explication of 
those wonderful terms of the Scriptures, those pro- 
phetic symbols, the end of the world, the second 
coming of Christ, the resurrection of the dead, the 
new heaven and the new earth. 



CHAPTEE VIIL 

THE NEW HEAVEN AND THE NEW EAETH, 

TjTTHAT is the end of the world? 

Is it the return of our globe to its orig- 
inal chaos ? the resolution of its elements into their 
primeval gases? the wreck of sun, moon, and planets? 
the falling of all the stars and all the constellations 
of stars into the sidereal abysses ? in short, is it the 
destruction of the physical universe, and the anni- 
hilation of time and space? Many good people seri- 
ously believe that this stupendous material catastrophe 
is predicted in the Word of God. 

In vain you ask them, What is the reason, necessity, 
or use of such an astounding event ? Why should 
God destroy His magnificent cosmos, His own foot- 
stool, the material basis upon which His heaven and 
His heaven of heavens are erected, the ground in 
which the tree of life is necessarily rooted, and from 
which it arises and spreads upwards into spiritual 
eternities? After millions and millions of ages of 
preparation for a physical universe connected indis- 

solubly with an immeasurable spiritual universe above 

203 



204 THE END 0F THE WORLD. 

it, why should He suddenly overwhelm it all in one 
hideous universal ruin, cease to create, and cease to 
bless ? 

Is it for any thing done in this pitiful little globe 
of ours, which can give a historic account of itself 
for only a few thousand years? That might be 
credited in an age when our earth was believed to 
be the flat centre of the universe, the only inhabit- 
able spot, while the sun, moon, and stars were merely 
lamps hung up in an ethereal dome a few miles above 
us to lighten our way. But now that we know our 
earth is but a microscopic speck, floating in a bound- 
less ocean of created forms; now that we think 
matter is indestructible, and the laws of nature uni- 
versal, immutable, and eternal, the sublime expres- 
sions of the will of an unchangeable and beneficent 
Creator, we see clearly that the end of the world and 
the destruction of time and space are either myths, 
or symbolic forms under which are concealed spir- 
itual truths, very different from what appears in the 
letter and vastly more important. 

Scientific and rational considerations fail, however, 
to make any impression on the average christian 
mind, which retorts that these things, however in- 
comprehensible or incredible they may seem, are 
plainly written in the Bible, and are found among 



THE NEW HEAVEN AND THE NEW EARTH. 205 

the most revered traditions of the Church. The 
early disciples of Christ certainly believed that all 
these astounding phenomena would occur literally in 
time and space. Moreover, they expected them to 
occur very soon, in that very generation. The 
Church was for years, and scores of years, and hun- 
dreds of years, in agitation on this subject. For a 
long, long time they looked for these great events 
every day, every month, every year. Like the Mil- 
lerites of modern time, they kept their ascension 
robes always ready to rise and meet the Lord in the 
air. After ages of disappointment faith weakened 
into hope, hope gave place to. doubt, doubt sank into 
despair, and despair into unbelief. And now that 
the prophecies are almost fulfilled, and the end of 
the world is really upon us, the majority of chris- 
tians have ceased to think or care anything about it, 
or practically to believe in its coming. 

It is clear that the apostles were not divinely in- 
spired to make the statement that the end of the 
world and the second coming of Christ were near at 
hand. They made a great mistake as to the time, 
which must be conceded, and it is exceedingly prob- 
able that they made a similar mistake as to the 
manner in which those events were to transpire. 

Their error, which was transmitted to the Church. 

18 



206 THE END OF THE WORLD. 

was that they interpreted literally, sensuously, and 
physically what had been communicated to them in 
the symbolic language of prophecy. The error was 
perpetuated by the utter divorce between spirit and 
matter which obtained in the crude philosophy of 
those dark ages. 

That divorce of spirit and matter still exists in 
the central strongholds of the christian Church. 
That Church is unaware of any organic connection 
between the natural world and the spiritual world. 
It locates heaven away beyond the stars, or, if it 
hesitates to give it any material locality, it conceives 
of it as a spiritual state without form or substance, 
like its God, " without body, parts, or passions/' It 
supposes that each world is so entirely separate and 
independent of the other that one might be de- 
stroyed and the other continue to exist. It does not 
know that they coexist and interpenetrate like soul 
and body. The forces of nature are only spiritual 
forces manifested through natural forms. The earth 
is the Lord's footstool, His basis, the perpetual seed- 
field of His creative energies. All spirits and angels 
have been once men or women on some material 
world like ours. God's creation always begins at the 
bottom or lowest and farthest point from Himself 
and ascends upwards. First that which is natural 



THE NEW HEAVEN AND THE NEW EARTH. 207 

and afterwards that which is spiritual, said Paul, 
and it is the law of the universe. No children are 
born in the spiritual realms, and souls would cease 
to be created if the physical universe was destroyed. 

Ignorant of these sublime truths and interpreting 
literally the Book of Revelation, a book plainly 
symbolical from beginning to end, the leaders of 
christian thought in the present century are com- 
mitted to the literalism and the naturalism of the 
earliest ages. A grand council of ministers of all 
denominations was held in New York in 1878 to 
discuss the great questions connected with the Second 
Advent. A true sign of the times and the dead 
state of the Church was seen in the fact that the 
only persons who could have pointed them to the 
truth, and have " opened their sealed eyes with spir- 
itual spittle," were deliberately excluded from the 
convention as a heretical element. There was not 
a ray of genuine spiritual light elicited during the 
whole discussion. 

Grossly literal and sensuous interpretation was the 
rule. Dr. Cummings' frantic struggle with the sym- 
bols of the Apocalypse, ending in locating the phys- 
ical destruction of all things towards the end of the 
present century, is a fair type of modern christian 
thought on the subject. The discussion might have 



208 THE END 0F THE WORLD. 

been well supplemented by old Mother Shipton's 
prophecy, made four hundred years ago, announcing 
the discovery of America, gold, railroads, steamboats, 
balloons, tunnels, diving-bells, ironclads, etc., and 
finally the end of the world in 1881 ! It would 
have been in keeping also to have aroused the latent 
astrological superstitions of the race by an allusion 
to the very singular conjunction of the greatest 
planets from the year 1881 to 1885, which must be 
surely prognostic of the most extraordinary convul- 
sions in nature ! 

In scientific and rational light the freaks of the 
orthodox imagination in picturing the literal events 
of the Second Advent are puerile, absurd, and phan- 
tasmagoric. The God of the universe sitting on a 
cloud to judge His creatures does not present a sub- 
lime but a grotesque image, and an utterly unworthy 
conception of Him. The dead bursting out of their 
graves, and bone uniting to bone, as described by 
Young and Pollock, is not pathos but bathos. All 
the attending circumstances, considered as objective 
facts, are unnatural, irrational, and illogical to the 
last degree. The notes are falsetto; the stars are 
gilt spangles; the flowers are painted tissue-paper. 
Everything is artificial about it, having no organic 
correlation with any thing else in history, science, 



THE NEW HEAVEN AND THE NEW EARTH. 209 

philosophy, or theology. These sensuous falsifica- 
tions of truth must inevitably give way before the 
transcendently important and beautiful spiritual sig- 
nifications of the sublime words of the Scriptures. 

The following are the only passages in the New 
Testament containing the expression "the end of 
the world :" 

" What shall be the sign of thy coming, and of the end 
of the world?" Matt. xxiv. 3. 

" The harvest is the end of the icorld" Matt. xiii. 39. 

" As therefore the tares are gathered and burned to- 
gether in the fire , so shall it be in the end of this world" 
Matt, xiii. 40. 

" I am with you always even unto the end of the world" 
Matt, xxviii. 20. 

" They are written for our admonition, upon whom the 
ends of the world are come." 1 Cor. x. 11. 

It is well known to Greek scholars that there is 
a mistranslation in all the above passages. The end 
of the world is a misleader and the cause of a gross 
misconception. The English word "world" does 
not convey the signification which the Greeks at- 
tached to the word axon used in the above places. 
The right translation is " the consummation or fin- 
ishing of the age." If the end of the physical 
o 18* 



210 THE END OF THE WORLD. 

world had been meant, the word cosmos would have 
been employed. That word cosmos is used a great 
many times in the New Testament when the world 
of nature or the world of evil, as distinguished from 
the Church, is signified. The age or dispensation 
changes or perishes ; the earth is established forever 
that it shall not be moved. The axon may terminate, 
the cosmos never. 

The age is the full period allotted to the rise and 
fall of a certain condition, institution, or order of 
things. We so understand it when we speak of the 
age of bronze, the golden age, the age of chivalry, 
the dark ages, etc. The consummation of the age 
is the closure of a dispensation, the end of a Church. 
The ends of the apostolic world are now truly upon 
us. A clergyman of the Church of England (Rev. 
C. D. Maitland, History of Noah's Day) has grasped 
and very forcibly expressed the true meaning of 
" the consummation of the age," — 

"We must understand by this phrase not the 
dissolution of the globe, but the end of a dispensa- 
tion or particular economy upon it ; and inasmuch 
as several of these have obtained by the divine ap- 
pointment, the expression, when it occurs, will mean 
the termination of one of these dispensations of God 
with man, the closing or shutting up of one account, 



THE NEW HEAVEN AND THE NEW EARTH. 211 

with a view to the adjustment of it, and the opening 
of another in order to a progression in the divine 
plan." 

The end of the Jewish world, age, or dispensation 
was predicted by the prophets as something which 
should come with terrible signs and wonders in the 
heavens and the earth, with darkening of the sun 
and moon, spiritual commotions, visions, apocalyptic 
revelations, and a day of wrath and judgment. 
Peter, on the day of Pentecost, told the people that 
those wonderful events, concealed under prophetic 
symbols, were happening at that very time. So it 
is in our own day. The sun and moon are dark- 
ened, the trumpet has sounded, the dead are rising 
from their graves, the heavens are opened, Christ is 
flaming in the clouds, the end of the world has 
come, and the judgment is upon us. The rulers in 
Israel rejected the Lord at His first coming, because 
they misinterpreted the prophecies. The evangelical 
christians are doing the same thing to-day. He 
comes to His own and His own receive Him not. 

The believer in the destruction of the physical 
universe, unconvinced by the above train of thought, 
points to the following passages of Scripture and 
asks their explanation : 



212 THE END OF THE WORLD. 

" Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words 
shall not pass away." Matt. xxiv. 35. 

" The earth and the heavens are the work of thy 
hands; they shall perish, but thou shalt endure." Ps. cii. 
25-26. 

" The heaven departed like a scroll when it is rolled 
together ; and every mountain and island were moved out 
of their places." Rev. vi. 14. 

" And I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the 
first heaven and the first earth were passed away? 1 Rev. 
xxi. 1. 

Heaven and earth used in conjunction are beauti- 
ful symbols of the interior and exterior states (sub- 
jective and objective) of human life. Heaven is the 
spiritual, rational, and moral part of our nature, 
while its civil, social, material, and sensuous elements 
constitute our earth. They are conjoined like soul 
and body. Our heaven is spiritual and invisible; 
our earth is external and institutional. " The king- 
dom of heaven is within you," said the Lord. The 
earth is the external Church which corresponds truly 
to the heaven within. 

The creation of the heaven and the earth, de- 
scribed in the first chapter of Genesis, is the creation 
of the human soul with its subjective and objective 
relations. A heaven and earth is destroyed at the 



THE NEW HEAVEN AND THE NEW EARTH. 213 

end of every dispensation, and a new heaven and a 
new earth created. The destruction of any given 
heaven and earth is simply the decline of the old 
system of belief and the destruction of the civil, 
social, and ecclesiastical forms which represent it in 
outward life. A new heaven and a new earth is a 
new order and system of life, spiritual and natural, 
a great change in our religious opinions and affec- 
tions, and in our external and institutional activities. 
This passing away of an old order of life and the 
creation of a new order is now gcing on with im- 
mense rapidity. It is one of the great discrete steps 
upward in the general life of humanity. It will be 
a perfect and total revolution. " Behold, I make all 
things new /" 

That the heavens and earth of scriptural language 
are not to be literally interpreted, but mean the in- 
terior and exterior, or subjective and objective, states 
and forms of the Church of God, or of the indi- 
vidual soul, which is a miniature church, is very ap- 
parent from the words of the prophets. When the 
Lord speaks of laying the foundations of the Jewish 
Church, He says, — 

" I have put my words into thy mouth, and I have cov- 
ered thee in the shadow of my hand, that I may plant 



214 THE END OF THE WORLD. 

the heavens, and lay the foundations of the earth, and 
say unto Zion, Thou art my people." Isaiah li. 16. 

When he predicts the end of the old Jerusalem 
and the building up of a new spiritual Jerusalem, or 
the substitution of the apostolic in the place of the 
Mosaic dispensation, his words are these : 

" Behold, I create new heavens and a new earth: and 
the former shall not be remembered or come into mind. 
But be ye glad and rejoice forever in that which I create : 
for, behold, I create Jerusalem a rejoicing, and her people 
a joy." Is. lxv. 17-18. 

Exploring the interior and exterior conditions of 
the Jewish Church, the Lord makes this report of it : 

" My people are foolish, they have not known me : they 
are wise to do evil, but to do good they have no knowledge. 
I beheld the earth, and, lo I it was without form and void; 
and the heavens, and they had no light" Jer. iv. 22-23. 

Who does not see that the natural heavens are not 
meant when the following are the terms in which a 
judgment upon the little land of Idumea is ex- 
pressed ? 

" And all the host of heaven shall be dissolved, and the 
heavens shall be rolled together as a scroll : and all their 
host shall fall down, as the leaf falleth off from the vine, 
and as a falling fig from the fig tree : 



THE NEW HEAVEN AND THE NEW EARTH, 215 

"For my sword shall be bathed in heaven : behold, it 
shall come down upon Idumea, and upon the people of my 
curse, to judgment." Is. xxxiv. 4-5. 

The destruction of Babylon, supposed to be long 
since accomplished, was foretold in similar symbolic 
language, which has never had any literal fulfilment 
and never will have. 

"For the stars of heaven and the constellations thereof 
shall not give their light : the sun shall be darkened in his 
going forth : and the moon shall not cause her light to 
shine.' 1 Is. xiii. 11. 

Who cannot see that the earth spoken of in the 
following passage is the false and faithless Church of 
Christ in its external relations ? 

"The windows from on high are open, and the founda- 
tions of the earth do shake. The earth is utterly broken 
down, the earth is clean dissolved, the earth is moved ex- 
ceedingly. 

"The earth shall reel to and fro like a drunkard, and 
shall be removed like a cottage ; and the transgression 
thereof shall be heavy upon it : and it shall fall and not 
rise again.' 1 Is. xxiv. 18-20. 

These evidences are surely enough to convince the 
candid christian that when our Lord says, " Heaven 
and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not 



216 THE END OF THE WORLD. 

pass away" He evidently means that the existing 
dispensation shall be dissolved and dissipated inter- 
nally and externally, while the words of divine truth 
shall remain ever the same. And when John, look- 
ing forth into the far future of the apostolic Church, 
exclaimed, " I saw a new heaven and a new earth ! 
for the former heaven and the former earth were 
parsed away" he means that the elements of the 
present christian ecclesiasticism will melt away and 
depart like a scroll, while the literal foundations 
upon which it rests will be overturned and destroyed, 
and a new faith and a new life from heaven will take 
its place. 

It is because the present mental heaven and earth 
of the christian are so dear to him, involving his 
faith, enlisting his affections, controlling his motives, 
determining his conduct, that he clings to them with 
such desperate tenacity, stoutly sustains them from 
the letter of the Word, and repudiates and denies 
any revelations of the spiritual sense of the Bible 
which threaten to rob him of things which in his 
eyes are so precious, so sacred, so desirable. He loves 
the old garments, the old wine, the old bottles, the 
old heaven, and the old earth, and he thinks he is 
right, wise, and good for doing so. 

How can this man be prepared to receive the new 



THE NEW HEAVEN AND THE NEW EARTH. 217 

things which are involved in the second coming of 
Christ? How can he be made to hear the last trum- 
pet, which is the spiritual sense of the Word of God 
waking the dead to life? How is he to undergo the 
resurrection of the dead, which he cannot do until 
he dies utterly to his selfhood, to his virtues as well 
as to his vices, to his hereditary life, to his doctrines, 
his opinions, his Church, his possessions, and to 
all the present institutional forms of human life. 
Nothing but new causes, new instrumentalities de- 
scending from heaven to earth in new revelations, 
can establish that perfect and redeemed form of 
human society, which is " the new heaven and the 
new earth" predicted in the Holy Scriptures. 

There is, therefore, no ground whatever, either in 
the nature of things or in the Word of God, for the 
common opinion that this world is to be destroyed. 
That a perfect and redeemed form of human society 
shall crown the earth with perpetual blessings is the 
affirmation of both reason and revelation. It was 
the end which God had in view in the creation of 
the physical universe, for such an end alone can 
manifest the glory of the Supreme Beneficence. It 
was the divine love, operating through the divine 
wisdom and revealing the divine power, that built 

up this sublime cosmos around us. Being perpetual, 
k 19 



218 THE END 0F THE WORLD. 

it will be perfected, and all the past events of his- 
tory are but the fluctuations, the up-and-down move- 
ments, the days and nights, the alternate winters and 
summers, by which the ripening of the great and 
final harvest is achieved. 

The destructive and reconstructive movements 
going on in the last century are proof of the passing 
away of the old heaven and earth and the prepara- 
tion for the new. 

" The last two or three centuries," says Frederic 
Harrison, "and certainly the last century, show us a 
time of combat, anarchy, experiment. Nothing rests 
in acknowledged rule. Parties, churches, creeds, phil- 
osophies loudly deny each other the very foundation 
of their existence. Civilization seems flung into the 
melting-pot to come out in some fresh mould. Mar- 
riage, government, society, property are all treated as 
open questions. Ideas, governments, churches, man- 
ners are all in perpetual chaos, dissolution, struggle." 

The teachings of the Word of God in favor of the 
heavenly perfection of human society, as the final 
end of all the laws of evolution, are abundant and 
unanswerable. 

" After those days, saith the Lord, I will put my law 
in their inward parts, and will write it in their hearts ; 
and will be their God, and they shall be my people. 



THE NEW HEAVEN AND THE NEW EARTH. 219 

" And they shall teach no more every man his neighbor, 
and every man his brother, saying, Know ye the Lord : 
for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the 
greatest of them, saith the Lord? 1 Jer. xxxi. 33-34. 

" The Lord hath comforted his people, he hath re- 
deemed Jerusalem. The Lord hath made bare his holy 
arm in the eyes of all nations ; and all the ends of the 
earth shall see the salvation of our God. 11 Isaiah lii. 9-10. 

" And it shall come to pass in the last days, that the 
mountain of the LoraVs house shall be established in the 
top of the mountains, and shall be exalted above the hills, 
and all nations shall flow into it. 11 Isaiah ii. 2. 

" They shall not hurt nor destroy in all my holy moun- 
tain, for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the 
Lord, as the waters cover the sea 11 Isaiah xi. 9. 

The mountain of the Lord is that high and holy 
state of spiritual exaltation in which we love the 
Lord supremely, and do His will upon earth even as 
it is done in heaven. The New Jerusalem, so beauti- 
fully described in the 21st chapter of Revelation, is 
the same state. It is commonly supposed to be our 
life in heaven, but that cannot be the case, for the 
holy city is said to descend "from God out of 
heaven." It is our life upon the earth, but upon an 
earth redeemed from all sin and spiritually con- 
joined with heaven and the angels. 



220 THE END 0F THE world. 

The final and perfect restoration of our human 
life to the heavenly standard is meant by Paul when 
he speaks of " the manifestation of the sons of God" 
in that wonderful 8th chapter of Romans. The 
" sons of God" are those spiritually-minded and per- 
fect christians of the coming age, who will utterly 
crucify the lusts of the flesh, who will die to sin and 
all its allurements, who will be lifted with their Lord 
above the life of the carnal nature, so that they will 
be " heirs of God and joint-heirs with Christ." They 
will attain the sanctification of the soul and the re- 
demption of the body. They will possess the earth 
and deliver the whole creation which now groans in 
bondage into the glorious liberty of the children of 
light. The theory of an organic destruction of the 
world does not agree with this prophecy of the cul- 
mination of the redemptive work of Christ in the 
spiritual, physical, and material salvation of the race. 

The new heaven and the new earth which will be 
formed upon the destruction of the old institutional 
order of things, religious and secular, will be the 
commune of Christ. The deviPs commune is now 
busily at work preparing for the overthrow of all 
existing institutions, not from the love of truth or 
of liberty, but from selfishness, hatred of others, and 
the spirit of license. The Lord, with His reapers 



THE NEW HEAVEN AND THE NEW EARTH. 221 

the angels, and the good spirits who are His minis- 
ters, is preparing by a thousand secret and invisible 
influences a spiritual commune, a new Church upon 
earth, which shall be one with His Church in 
heaven. 

The devil's commune will demand a division of 
all things, each man acting from himself as a centre, 
and claiming an equal right and share with all 
others. As the commune of Christ is based upon 
the principles of total self-abnegation and self-sur- 
render, each member desires to communicate all he 
has to others. These are fundamental differences, 
the differences between heaven and hell. Under- 
neath all disguises and external appearances, these 
are really the only two great forces which stand con- 
fronting each other in irreconcilable hostility, and 
all men are secretly and spiritually arranged upon 
one side or the other. 

In our miserable and sensual condition, in our 

age of " part iron and part clay," we can scarcely 

imagine the total and radical revolution in all the 

affections, thoughts, motives, and conduct of men 

which is involved in doing the will of God on earth 

as it is done in heaven. Such a state is possible, for 

we are commanded to pray for it in one of the daily 

petitions of the Lord's prayer. It seems, however, 

19* 



222 THE END 0F THE world. 

afar off, for the new earth means co-operation instead 
of competition, altruism instead of selfishness, social- 
ism instead of individualism, the perfect consecration 
of the unit to the service and welfare of the whole. 
Religion means service, and the abolition of the sel- 
fish instincts. The wild projects and beautiful Uto- 
pias of the best socialists are but the broken dreams 
of the dissatisfied human soul, yearning in its dark- 
ness after a perfect order of things, an order which 
can only be realized by a total surrender of all in- 
terests, affections, and individual aspirations to the 
unitizing spirit and power of the Lord Jesus Christ. 
The bond of union in this final and perfect re- 
organization of society, which shall encompass and 
possess the earth, is the love of Christ as the Divine 
Man, and the implantation of His life and will in 
the individual soul. When the disciples have incor- 
porated the Christ into their lives by eating His 
flesh and drinking His blood, we shall have the 
integral elements of that commune which He desired 
to establish, and a virtual reincarnation of the Son 
of Man in the organic life of the race. All this 
is involved in the following w T onderful words of 
Jesus. 

" As the Father hath loved me, so have I loved you : 
continue ye in my love. 11 Jno. xv. 9. 



THE NEW HEAVEN AND THE NEW EARTH. 223 

" If a man love me, lie icill keep my words : and my 
Father icill love him, and we will come unto him, and make 
our abode icith him" Jno. xiv. 23. 

" He that eateth my flesh, and drinlceth my blood, 
dicelleth in me and I in Him." Jno. vi. 56. 

" Re that abideth in me, and I in him, the same 
bringeih forth much fruit. " Jno. xv. 5. 

" This is my commandment, That ye love one another 
as I have loved you." Jno. xv. 12. 

" That they all may be one ; as than, Father, art in 
me, and I in thee, that they also may be one in us." Jno. 
xvii. 21. 

" As the living Father hath sent me and I live by the 
Father : so he that eateth me, even he shall live by me." 
Jno. vi. 57. 

" The glory which thou gavest me I have given them, 
that they may be one, even as we are one. 

u I in them, and thou in me, that they may be made 
perfect in one." Jno. xvii. 22-23. 

These are the divine laws of the commune of 
Christ, the sacred principles which alone can estab- 
lish the new heaven and the new earth. Why has 
not the Church of Christ understood and obeyed 
them? Because it has totally misconceived the 
nature and mission of Christ, and has utterly ignored 
that life-long work of regeneration, which effects a 



224 THE END 0F THE WORLD. 

spiritual union between our souls and the Divine 
Man, by the same laws and processes which made 
the human nature of Christ a divine nature. 

When we survey the spiritual state of the world 
as revealed in the civilization of our great christian 
cities, such as New York, London, and Paris, and 
mark the organized selfishness, acquisitiveness, com- 
bativeness, meannesses, hatreds, lusts, sensualities, 
and bestialities of the human race; and remember 
that the same elements exist in the sparsest popula- 
tions of the country, and would be manifested by 
aggregation in the same manner; and w r hen more- 
over we reflect that there is not enough religion and 
enlightenment in the world, unbacked by an armed 
police and the terrors of the law, to protect the lives 
and property of the good and peaceful from the evil 
and violent ; we begin to realize what a thinly con- 
cealed hell we live in, and may wonder how the 
blessed future of the world, predicted in the Word 
of God, can possibly be brought about. 

It will certainly not be brought about without 
great and terrible commotions and tribulations. 
There will be a fearful shaking of all things in the 
heavens and the earth, so that the evil and the false 
things may be destroyed and dissipated, and " those 
things which cannot be shaken may remain." (Heb. 



THE NEW HEAVEN AND THE NEW EARTH. 99.3 

xii. 27.) The infernal spirit which has possession 
of the world, like that which tortured the lunatic 
child, will cast it into the water and the fire, and 
when finally ejected, will leave it as if it were dead. 
The antagonisms of selfish interests will come to the 
front as never before. The combinations of evil 
men for evil purposes will be overwhelmingly pow- 
erful. Wars of vast extent and terrible atrocity will 
result. Institutions will be overturned, churches 
will disintegrate, society will be dissolved. Perse- 
cutions and tribulations will abound, and mankind 
will pass through a crisis greater than any which has 
hitherto overtaken the race. 

These things are predicted in the Word of God 
and are the inevitable results of causes now in oper- 
ation. Those causes cannot be arrested, but will 
work out their final and logical issues. Such is the 
judgment of this world. And yet out of all this 
chaos will emerge the "new heavens and the new 
earth, wherein dwelleth righteousness." The hopes 
of those who are attempting to build up a natural 
religion, without Christ and the Bible, will be utterly 
disappointed. Their schemes will go down in the 
common wreck. The present effete system of Chris- 
tianity, paralyzed with its load of false doctrines, can 
do nothing to avert the evil, and very little to pro- 
P 



228 THE END OF THE WORLD. 

mote the good. Like Buddhism or Judaism, it has 
fulfilled its mission, exhausted its spiritual energies, 
and buried its Master's talent in the ground to await 
His coming. 

The secret forces of the spiritual life, which are 
the laws of the divine providence, have been engaged 
for several centuries in preparing a foundation for a 
new order of things. This consists in man's extraor- 
dinary conquests over himself and over nature, in 
the growth of individualism and liberalism, in the 
development of arts and sciences, the vast extensions 
of commerce, the republicanization of governments, 
the education and elevation of the people, the frater- 
nization of nations, the rise of the co-operative spirit, 
and the conception of the solidarity of the race. 
But all these things are mere forms, mere external- 
isms ; dry bones, into which no new and eternal 
breath of life can be breathed by scientism, or ration- 
alism, or evolutionism, or a corrupted Christianity. 
They await their vitalization by the infusion of new 
truths, new forces, a new life, descending from God 
out of heaven. 

The forces engaged in the approaching destruction 
and reconstruction of society are in reality, behind 
all external appearances, spiritual forces. They are 
efforts of the spirit to readjust its external relations 



THE NEW HEAVEN AND THE NEW EARTH. 227 

into harmony with its progressive internal conditions. 
Society will no doubt pass through many temporary 
experimental phases before reaching a pure and per- 
fect state. Outside pressure, however coercive or 
persuasive, will go for nothing. Organizations upon 
external principles will inevitably fail. The lasting 
conditions will only be attained by heavenly influ- 
ences working from above downward and from 
within outward. 

The causes now interiorly at work to produce the 
final and glorious state of a perfected humanity, a 
new heaven and a new earth, to supersede the present 
order of religious and civil life, are twofold : firstly, 
new light and power proceeding from the spiritual 
sense of the Word of God now opened and revealed 
to the Church ; and secondly, new influences flowing 
down from heaven through the w T orld of spirits, 
which has been brought into more direct and power- 
ful communication with the minds and hearts of 
men. 

Let us consider the true nature and operation of 
these tremendous causes, the very existence of which 
is unknown to the majority of the christian world. 



CHAPTER IX. 

THE BOOK OPENED. 

** T^HEN I consider the general weakening of 
'^ moral principles," says Le Maistre, "the 
diversity of opinions, the overthrow of sovereignties 
which were baseless, the immensity of our needs, and 
the inanity of our means, it seems to me that every 
true philosopher must choose between these two 
hypotheses: either he must form a new religion alto- 
gether, or Christianity must be rejuvenated in some 
extraordinary manner." 

" I look," says the same acute writer, " for a mem- 
orable revolution, of which that we have seen has 
been only the terrible and indispensable preliminary ; 
a period which will be sacred in the annals of the 
human race; for everything announces that grand 
unity towards which we are advancing with mighty 
strides ; some great event for which the world uni- 
versally waits, some immense event in the divine 
order, some third explosion of almighty goodness in 
behalf of the human race." 



That period, sacred in the annals of the race, has 

228 



THE BOOK OPENED. 229 

arrived; that rejuvenation of Christianity has begun; 
that great event in the divine order, that new explo- 
sion of almighty goodness has occurred. It con- 
sisted in the revelation of the spiritual sense of the 
Word of God, whereby all the old issues have been 
silenced, settled, or ignored, and a grand series of 
new questions have been opened for the study, en- 
lightenment, and purification of the race. 

In the golden age of the Church when the opinions 
of the apostles were dominant, the Word of God 
was believed to be plenarily and divinely inspired. 
It was considered to be the very life and thought of 
God concealed under various literal appearances, and 
to have a genuine spiritual power, not only to con- 
vert the heart and illumine the mind of the believer, 
but to serve as an invisible bond of connection be- 
tween the Church upon earth and "the Jerusalem 
which is above." It was because the primitive chris- 
tian had this true conception of the Divine Word, 
that he is represented as riding on the white horse, 
crowned and going forth to conquer, and also as the 
lion w r ith a man's heart and eagle's wings. 

" Woe," said a learned Rabbi, " woe to the man 
who says that the Pentateuch contains only com- 
mon sayings and ordinary narratives. For if this 

20 



230 THE END 0F THE world. 

were the case, we might in the present day compose 
a code of doctrines from profane writings which 
should excite greater respect. But every word of 
the Law contains a sublime sense and a heavenly 
mystery." 

Our Lord taught that living and spiritual forces 
of inconceivable power were concealed within the 
literal text of His words. He declared also that 
His own life and works were the subject themes of 
Moses and the Prophets, although there are very 
few outward traces of such a thing in those writers. 
The apostles faintly recognized the spiritual sense 
of the Scriptures. They knew the allegories and 
parables were full of spiritual significance, and they 
had advanced one great step farther; they under- 
stood in a measure that the persons, places, and 
natural objects mentioned in the holy writings were 
types and symbols of spiritual things. 

Origen sought diligently for that pearl of great 
price, the spiritual sense of the Word, which he 
knew was somewhere and somehow hidden in the 
field of the literal sense, but he never discovered it. 
Bishop Home and Mosheim both say that u the 
spiritual method of interpretation did universally 
prevail in the Church from the beginning." But 
all these efforts were mere guess-work, Teachings out 



THE BOOK OPENED. 231 

• in the dark after a hidden light, attempts to alle- 
gorize or spiritualize the Bible by the force of the 
human imagination. There was no revelation on 
the subject, no organic system of thought, no phil- 
osophic coherence of idea. They had no key to open 
the casket of mystery. Christian literature from that 
time to this is full of fanciful and profitless theories, 
by which good men have imagined that they pene- 
trated the concealed wonders of the inspired book. 
They all failed so egregiously that now the ministry 
of the Church denies that the inspired book ever had 
any wonders concealed in it. 

The spiritual sense of the Word of God is some- 
thing entirely different. The divine book is written 
within and without. It has three distinct meanings, 
one within another, celestial, spiritual, and natural. 
The difference between them is not like the differ- 
ence between three specimens of water, more or less 
pure and clear, but they differ like ice, water, and 
steam, being the same thing on three different and 
discrete planes, presenting entirely different appear- 
ances and properties on each plane. They are related 
like affection, thought, and action. These three lines 
are parallel and never meet, and still they correspond, 
so that what exists in one line appears upon the line 
beneath it in a different but corresponding form. 



232 THE END 0F THE WORLD. 

The divine wisdom of the Word, flowing down into 
the celestial sphere of life, becomes the thought of 
the celestial angels. Flowing down through them 
into the spiritual sphere, it becomes the thought of 
the spiritual angels. Flowing down through them 
into the world of men, it takes on historical, poetic, 
or prophetic forms through the media of our human 
life, appearing then altogether as a human and im- 
perfect production. 

The lowest or literal sense of the Bible appears 
to be a medley of Jewish history, laws, poetry, and 
mystical writings, containing many things very hard 
to understand, repugnant to our scientific and rational 
thought, and having very little apparent reference 
to the business and life of man in the present age. 
The spiritual sense is something entirely above this 
level, using persons and places and things as mere 
symbols or correspondences to treat interiorly of the 
spiritual life, of God and the human soul, of the rise 
and fall of the various dispensations, of the redemp- 
tive work of Christ from the beginning of the 
world, and of all the psychological mysteries of re- 
generation. Many examples of it have already been 
given in this little volume, and yet more will be 
offered. The spiritual sense is a vast organic body 
or system of spiritual truth — the mental food and 



THE BOOK OPENED. 233 

life of the angels above us, so that its revelation to 
men is a veritable opening of the heavens to our 
affections and thoughts. 

Little do they know of the Word of God and its 
supernal architecture (for it rises story above story) 
who think it is a literal message to Jews and chris- 
tians, a book like other books, to be opened and 
analyzed and fathomed by the feeble human under- 
standing. It is the Book which none can open but 
the Son of Man. The Church is so sunk in natural- 
ism and sensualism that nothing but a revelation of 
the meaning of the revelation can make us realize 
the divine authorship of the Bible. The Word of 
God, which was made thought as well as flesh for us, 
is God; His wisdom proceeding from His divine 
love, existing throughout the universe, an infinite 
and ubiquitous emanation; pressing down every- 
where into the minds of all created intelligences it 
becomes a revelation, the source of life and thought, 
the only spiritual light of all the worlds, descending 
from heaven to heaven, down through the world of 
spirits to man ; having different forms and meanings 
everywhere as it passes through different media; 
clothing itself in each successively lower sphere with 
forms and language and imagery, corresponding to 

the nature and needs of its inhabitants; becoming 

20* 



234 THE END OF THE WORLD. 

more and more obscure as it descends ; wrapped in 
successive garments of lower and lower meanings 
and accommodating itself with an infinite flexibility 
and condescension to the capacities and necessities 
of each and all. 

This view of the" Word of God is one of the most 
sublime and beautiful conceptions which was ever 
presented to the human imagination. The Bible is 
indeed Emmanuel — God with us. It is Christ 
spiritually present and operating in us. It is the 
hidden life of the world, of the Church, and of the 
regenerating soul. It connects us with each other, 
with good spirits, with angels, with heaven, with 
God. It is the life of Jesus Christ in-breathed under 
various forms of thought into the souls of His crea- 
tures. Compare this grand idea of inspiration with 
the theories of inspiration or rather of non-inspira- 
tion which prevail in the christian churches, and 
which rob the Scriptures of all true power and glory. 
The fundamental principle of modern criticism is 
that the Bible, like other books, has but one mean- 
ing, the meaning it had in the mind of the writer, 
and no second or hidden sense different from that 
which appears on the "surface. This rejection of 
the spiritual sense of the Word of God is analogous 
to the rejection of the Son of God by the Jews, who 



THE BOOK OPENED. 235 

could see nothing of Him but His humble and unob- 
trusive exterior. 

" Is not this the carpenter s son ? Is not his mother 
called Mary? and his brethren, James and Joses, and 
Simon, and Judas ? 

11 And his sisters, are they not all with us ? Whence 
then hath this man all these things?" Matt. xiii. 55-56. 

So the scientist and the rationalist and the literal 
christian exclaim, Is not this Bible, which you call 
divine, a mere collection of Jewish histories, rituals, 
songs, and mystical sayings ? Do we not trace its 
descent from the Egyptian, Assyrian, and Oriental 
theogonies and philosophies? Do we not see its kin- 
ship to the systems of Manu, Confucius, Zoroaster, 
Mahomet, and others? More or less reasonable 
and intelligible, how does it differ from these other 
religious books which claim also a heavenly origin ? 
Whence hath it this great internal light, this spirit- 
uality, this ubiquity, this infinity you claim for it? 

" The words I speak unto you, they are spirit and 
they are life," said Jesus. The divine Word is a 
living force and not a dead record. It is never past 
but always present. All of its histories, miracles, 
prophecies are being enacted and re-enacted every 
day in the hearts and lives of Christendom. The 



236 THE END OF THE WORLD. 

creation, the expulsion from Eden, the building of 
Babel, the flood, the call of Abraham, the escape of 
Lot from Sodom, the story of Joseph in Egypt, the 
travels in the wilderness, the conquest of Canaan, 
the joys, and sorrows, the exaltations and despairs of 
the Psalmist, are all going on continually in the souls 
of men. The spiritual sense contains every man's 
biography, catechism, judgment, and universal guide 
through time and through eternity. 

The literal sense of the Word of God is described 
in that Word under the figure of the clouds of 
heaven? Why is this? Water, in the scriptural 
language of symbols, means truth in one of its lower 
degrees, truth as applied to the scientific and rational 
spheres of our life. We are born and reared and 
trained in this sensuous and literal atmosphere of 
thought, and so long as we live in nature cannot rise 
wholly above it. Even when we apply our minds 
to spiritual things, as to God, the soul, the church, 
duty, the life after death, etc., the water of thought 
or truth merely ascends from the earth and is con- 
densed into clouds above it. It is not changed in 
substance ; it is still water. So our clouds, although 
floating on high, do not represent spiritual truths, 
but only our natural, literal, and sensuous way of 
looking at spiritual things. This mode of thought 



THE BOOK OPENED. 237 

is as necessary to our spiritual life on earth as clouds 
are to the welfare of the physical globe. God could 
not descend to us at all except through clouds, but 
would burn and destroy us with the infinite heat 
and light of the divine sun. Examine a few state- 
ments of the Word on the subject. 

u He bowed the heavens also, and came down ; and dark- 
ness was under his feet. He made darkness Ms secret 
place : his pavilion round about him were dark waters, and 
thick clouds of the sky." Ps. xviii. 9-11. 

" Clouds and darkness are round about him." Ps. 
xcvii. 2. 

" And the Lord said unto Moses, Lo ! I come unto thee 
in a thick cloud, that the people may hear when I speak 
with thee and believe thee forever. " Ex. xix. 9. 

" And the people stood afar off, and Moses drew near 
unto the thick darkness where God was." Ex. xx. 21. 

" Behold, the Lord rideth upon a swift cloud, and shall 
come into Egypt." Isa. xix. 1. 

The Lord cannot manifest Himself unto us as He 
is in Himself, or even as He appears to the angels 
who are purely spiritual. Whenever we look towards 
His essential nature or attempt to see Him as He is 
in heaven, a cloud receives Him out of our sight. 
But the cloud is in ourselves. The darkness, the 
clouds, the thick clouds, the dark w r aters are all our 



238 THE END 0F THE WORLD, 

own. They are our dark and obscure states of spirit- 
ual life, and our sensuous conception of spiritual 
things in which we receive God and interpret Him 
according to those states. The literal sense of the 
Bible«is such a cloud. It contains only such a view 
of God and our relations to Him as could be ob- 
tained by the passage of divine light through the 
thick clouds and great organic darkness of the Jew- 
ish mind. Still every jot and tittle of it is holy 
and eternal, containing beneath the temporary dark- 
ness of the letter the uncreated light or wisdom 
of the spiritual world. The literal sense is, there- 
fore, imperfect, evanescent, belonging only to this 
world : the spiritual sense is eternal and imperish- 
able. 

We cannot get rid of our clouds, for they are a 
part of our mental structure, but they will vary im- 
mensely according to the nature of the truth we 
believe and try to live. They may present the 
thickness and darkness which excluded the divine 
light from the Jewish mind, so that it had the most 
erroneous conceptions of God and His relation to 
His creatures, conceptions transmitted to the chris- 
tian Church. They may be still thicker and darker 
as in the scientist of the present day, who sees no 
God at all, and no divine life in the sacred writings. 



THE BOOK OPENED. 239 

They may present every degree of tenuity, every 
shade of color, and every conceivable form. They 
may be radiant with the reflected light and beauty 
and glory of spiritual truth. They may consist 
merely of an invisible vapor almost pervious to the 
rays of the divine sun. 

God has revealed Himself to mankind through 
written revelations which necessarily took form and 
color from each mind through which they passed. 
He enters into the clouds of human conception. He 
then speaks from above downwards or from within 
outw T ards, and not as one man to another on the same 
plane. These utterances therefore have a double 
signification, one the genuine spiritual truth as it is 
the heavens, the other the apparent truth, or spirit- 
ual truth changed and accommodated to the condi- 
tion of our literal and sensuous human thought. 
This is the letter of the Word. It was because man 
disobeyed these truths, and became so utterly per- 
verted and corrupt, that divine truth could not be 
revealed without being falsified as it passed through 
his mind, that the incarnation of God in the person 
of Jesus Christ became necessary for the salvation 
of the race. 

When Jesus Christ was in the world, He spoke 
w r ith men face to face, but although His power of 



240 THE END 0F THE WORLD. 

illuminating their minds was thereby greatly in- 
creased, His words had always that double meaning, 
which is an organic necessity, when a thought passes 
from the spiritual degree of life down into the nat- 
ural degree of life below it. " Without a parable 
spake He not unto them." He therefore said to 
His disciples, u It is the spirit that quickeneth, the 
flesh profiteth nothing : the words I speak unto you, 
they are spirit and they are life." He did not, how- 
ever, reveal the spiritual sense of the Word of God 
to them, for they could not have understood it or 
have obeyed it. That great blessing was reserved 
for the fulness of time, the end of the world, for the 
new heavens and the new earth. 

God's promises to mankind in the future are, not 
that He will make any further additions to His 
divine Word, or that He will come in person to 
reign upon the earth, as is erroneously supposed ; but 
that He will open the spiritual sense of the Word, 
judge mankind by its sacred standards, and bring 
the thought and life of the world and the Church 
up to its heavenly level. Mark the forms of the 
predictions. 

1. " Behold, he cometh with clouds ; and every eye shall 
see him, and they also which 'pierced him ; and all kindreds 
of the earth shall wail because of him.' 1 Rev. i. 7. 



THE BOOK OPENED. 241 

His coming is therefore not a personal one, which 
would be or might be without clouds, but a revela- 
tion of Himself to the mental sphere of our life 
represented by clouds. Every eye shall see Him, 
because He will illumine every understanding with 
spiritual truth. This will bring all into judgment, 
so that those who have rejected Him, and all the 
kindred of the earth, all our present civil, ecclesias- 
tical, and institutional forms of life, shall wail be- 
cause of the destruction that awaits them. 

2. " And they shall see the Son of Man coming in the 
clouds of heaven with great power and glory, 

" And he shall send his angels with a great sound of 
a trumpet, and they shall gather together his elect" Matt, 
xxiv. 30-31. 

Any new light or truth breaking forth from the 
Word of God is a new revelation, or coming, or 
appearing of Christ, because Christ is God, and God 
is the "Word. He comes in the clouds of heaven 
with great power and glory, because the illumination 
of the spiritual faculties of the race by means of the 
spiritual sense of the Word, is something far more 
sublime, powerful, glorious, and godlike than any 
personal appearance in the clouds of the physical 
atmosphere possibly could be. It is so great, that 

L q 21 



242 THE END OF THE WORLD. 

it brings us into direct communication with the 
angels of heaven, who, by means of the great reve- 
lation made to us of the same truths they acknowl- 
edge and live by, attract us to themselves and bring 
us nearer and nearer to Christ, who is the living soul 
of which His Church is the body. This is the 
gathering of the elect, the union of the Church in 
heaven with the Church upon earth. 

3. " Behold, one like the Son of Man came with the 
clovds of heaven, and came to the Ancient of days, and 
they brought him near before him. 

u And there was given him dominion, and glory, and a 
kingdom, that all people, nations, and languages should 
serve him : his dominion is an everlasting dominion, which 
shall not pass away, and his kingdom that which shall not 
be destroyed.'' 1 Dan. vii. 13-14. 

When Christ comes in the clouds of our heaven, 
He reveals His true character and mission to our 
spiritual faculties. The first effect of this is to bring 
the Son of Man and the Ancient of Days nearer 
together. We then see God in Christ as the one 
Lord. They are really one, but they have been 
long separated in the mind and thought of the 
Church. The different offices, attitudes, and relations 
of the Father and the Son, as taught in the chris- 



THE BOOK OPENED. 213 

tian theologies, have been shown in the preceding 
pages to have been the causes of the falsifications of 
divine truth which have brought the apostolic Church 
to an end. When we understand the divine truth 
that there is not, never was, and never can be any 
Father out of Christ, and that Christ always was, 
we get hold of that central spiritual truth which is 
the source of all spiritual truths, and which will 
have an everlasting dominion, and establish a king- 
dom which can never be destroyed. 

The opening of the Word or the revelation of 
the spiritual sense of the Bible is the most stupend- 
ous event of modern times. It is only paralleled in 
importance by the personal advent of Jehovah as 
the historic man Jesus Christ. It is the last trumpet 
or call from heaven which awakens the dead, the 
dead in spirit, the dead affections, the dead institu- 
tions, the dead Churches. It is a revealing of Christ 
in the power and glory of spiritual truth. It is a 
virtual descent of Christ into the souls of men for 
the purposes of judgment, to sanctify or to condemn. 
It brings about that great final, discrete, upward 
step in the life of humanity which is typified as a 
new heaven and a new earth. It is the opening of 
divine possibilities. Christ is said to bring the holy 
angels with Him, because the truths revealed in the 



244 THE EI *D OF THE WORLD, 

spiritual sense are the veritable doctrines taught and 
believed in heaven, and which will enable men upon 
earth to think as the angels think, to feel as the 
angels feel, and to live as the angels live. 

The " masters in Israel," the christian clergy, who 
should have known and anticipated these things, 
have committed the fatal error of their Jewish pro- 
totypes in expecting their Messiah to come in a 
manner suggested by a literal and sensuous interpre- 
tation of the prophecies. While they are gazing 
into the clouds, awaiting the descent of His material 
body, an event, which, if it were possible, could 
make no impression upon the spiritual life of the 
race ; He has come with an opening of the heavens 
in His Divine Word, and is proceeding rapidly, by 
innumerable agencies visible and invisible, to the 
destruction of the old and the institution of a new 
order of things. He has come like a thief in the 
night. He has found the shepherds of His flock 
asleep at their posts, or " eating and drinking with 
the drunken." The end of the world has come, but 
they do not see it. The trumpet has sounded, but 
they give it no heed. The great Book is opened, 
but they pay it no attention. 

The spiritual sense of the Word of God was 
revealed to mankind by the Lord Jesus Christ 



THE BOOK OPENED. 245 

through the agency of Emanuel Swedenborg during 
a series of years about the middle of the last century. 
It is said " by the Lord Jesus Christ" because no 
revelation can be made from heaven, no opening of 
the Word can be effected, not the least, unless the 
Lord Himself, who is the all in all both in heaven 
and in the Word, wills that it shall be done. It is 
said also " through the agency of Emanuel Sweden- 
borg," for how can any communication be made from 
heaven to mankind except through the medium of 
some man ? If an angel be the messenger he must 
still deliver the message to some human being who 
can impart it to others. The various books of the 
Bible were given in this way, at different times and 
places and by different men. The human agent is 
indispensable. 

Swedenborg, however, added not a line to the literal 
form of the Divine Word. His mission differs from 
that of the other divine messengers in this. They 
gave literal form and expression to the spiritual truths 
which flowed through their minds, spiritual light 
being changed into natural light during the process. 
The writers had no perception or consciousness of 
the higher or interior truths which were involved in 
the literal statements they made. Swedenborg, how- 
ever, was elevated into spiritual light, the light of 

21* 



246 THE END OF THE WORLD. 

heaven, from which he discerned the whole system 
of spiritual truth which is concealed in the symbol- 
ism of the letter, and he was empowered not only to 
see it, but to explain it clearly and rationally for the 
future spiritual uses of the Church and the world. 
The new heaven and the new earth would be im- 
possible, but for the marvellous angelic light thus 
radiating forth from the opened Word of God. 

Imagine a building erected thousands of years 
ago, containing ten thousand rooms, the doors of 
which were closed with locks of the most difficult 
construction and every lock different from each of the 
others. No man in all these ages, notwithstanding 
innumerable trials, has ever succeeded in inventing 
a key which would open a single door. Suddenly a 
man appears who brings forward at once ten thou- 
sand keys which fit unerringly into the ten thousand 
locks and all the chambers are thrown open to the 
air. Will anything explain this miracle except the 
supposition that the man w T ho opened the house com- 
municated with or derived his information in some 
way from the architect who built the house so many 
thousands of years before ? This was the feat which 
Swedenborg accomplished, and it was light from that 
God, who is the Word, that enabled him to open 
the written Word for our use. 



THE BOOK OPENED. 247 

The faithless Church which has lost the light of 
the living Word, and knows nothing of the soul, or 
the life after death, or the organic relations between 
spirit and matter, regards with astonishment or in- 
credulity our statement, that Swedenborg lived thirty 
years in open communication with angels and spir- 
its whilst actively and intelligently performing his 
duties in this world: that he studied the Word of 
God as it is known and understood in the heavens, 
and that he became familiar with the spiritual mys- 
teries of the divine kingdom by long and actual con- 
tact and observation. Those, however, who #njoy a 
living faith in the Word of God, who accept all its 
dear miracles as genuine truths, who believe that 
Balaam was a seer " with his eyes open," that Eze- 
kiel and John saw into the spiritual world, that 
Paul had insight into the third heaven, that Moses 
and Elias appeared to the disciples on the mount, 
etc., will find no special difficulty in the matter. 
They will rather consider Swedenborg's long intro- 
mission into the spiritual world, as the most simple, 
direct, and natural method the Lord could have 
adopted to impart to His needy creatures a vast body 
of spiritual truth most sadly needed, and which will 
be the wonder and delight of future ages. 

Every man who has a mission to fill is prepared 



248 THE END 0F THE WORLD. 

for it by a thousand concurrent influences which 
descend from the remote past. He is then appa- 
rently the outflowering of the circumstances and ne- 
cessities of his times. The life and character of 
Swedenborg were moulded and superintended by 
that special providence which notices the fall of 
every sparrow. The idea that he was an amiable 
fanatic who went crazy over profound theological 
speculations is the offspring of ignorance or malice. 
He was over fifty years of age when called to his 
great mission, having spent his life in arduous scien- 
tific labors and practical pursuits. He was assessor 
of the mines of Sweden, had written books upon 
algebra, mineralogy, astronomy, physiology, and 
other scientific subjects, and was considered a model 
of learning, industry, and common sense. He re- 
tained almost to the day of his death a superb health 
of both mind and body. He had never dreamed of 
any spiritual mission until it overtook him, and he 
was as much astonished as Moses was at the burning 
bush, or as Saul of Tarsus at the great light which 
fell suddenly upon him ; and he was as truly a mes- 
senger from God to man as Moses or Paul. 

Intro-mission into the spiritual world was abso- 
lutely necessary for Swedenborg to comprehend the 
principles which govern the construction of the 



THE BOOK OPENED. 249 

Word of God, for the key to its spiritual sense is 
the science of correspondences, or the science of the 
relation between spiritual and natural things. This 
science of correspondences was well known to the 
most ancient people of the earth, but was lost with 
the ancient life of goodness and truth. Traces of it 
are to be found in many of the myths, fables, and 
poems of the oriental world. All efforts, however, 
to rediscover the spiritual sense by metaphorical 
and allegorical interpretations have been ineffectual. 
Most christians of the present day, who think of 
Swedenborg at all, think that he made another fruit- 
less effort to spiritualize the Word of God by the 
powers of his own imagination. Fatal mistake ! 

The spiritual sense of the Word flows only from 
the divine sphere of the Lord Jesus Christ. It fills 
the heavens with light, and could only be revealed 
to some man who lived simultaneously and con- 
sciously in both worlds at the same time, and who 
could therefore unfold and explain in the natural 
life what he had seen and learned in his interior 
condition. This accounts for the anomaly, the stand- 
ing miracle, of Swedenborg's psychological state, 
which such scientists as Maudsley are totally incapa- 
ble of comprehending. In all this Swedenborg was 
a passive medium. He claims no originality or 



250 THE END OF TEE WORLD. 

powers of invention. He is thoroughly impersonal; 
his ideas of the spiritual sense were all derived ; he 
simply reports things heard and seen. Whilst de- 
voutly reading the Word of God, the spiritual sense 
flowed into his mental perceptions from the light of 
the divine sphere. 

Swedenborg has unfolded the meaning of the 
books of Genesis and Exodus, and of the Apoca- 
lypse, in about fifteen large octavo volumes. In the 
course of these works he has given us the corre- 
spondences or the spiritual meanings of so many 
names of persons and places and of so many natural 
objects, that we have the key which opens the rest 
of the Word, and there is no mysterious passage 
which will not burst into light upon its application. 
This science of correspondences is the language of 
symbols. Its study is not difficult but extensive, 
and one must master its alphabet thoroughly before 
he can perceive the beauty and immensity to which 
it leads. It is called fanciful and poetic only by 
those who have merely glanced at it. It is as thor- 
oughly unimaginative and organic, scientific we may 
say, as anatomy, botany, or geology. 

Any one who will candidly and patiently study 
the spiritual sense revealed by Swedenborg will dis- 
cover that it runs clearly, coherently, and instruct- 



THE BOOK OPENED. 251 

ively through every verse and chapter of the Sacred 
Scriptures. He will soon find out that the spiritual 
truths revealed are not the coinage of the writer's 
brain, but pre-existed in the Book of Books itself, as 
a part of its organic structure, something found and 
explained but never invented by Swedenborg. It is 
as easy to believe that Columbus created America 
instead of discovering it, as that Swedenborg con- 
cocted a vast system of spiritual truth which fits 
unerringly, point for point, like the soul into the 
body, into all the literal forms of a number of He- 
brew books, written by different persons, in different 
styles, on different subjects, and in different ages, and 
all thousands of years before he was born ! It is 
preposterous ! 

I would here press two considerations upon the 
reader : first, that there is not another book in the 
world written upon the principle of correspondence, 
which differs materially from metaphor and allegory. 
There is no other book in the world which contains 
a coherent system of spiritual philosophy concealed 
under the forms of national history and personal 
adventure. We cite the philosophy of the incarna- 
tion of God, and the psychological experiences of 
Jesus Christ in his work of redemption, and the 
similar experiences of every regenerating soul, which 



252 THE END OF THE WORLD. 

Swedenborg draws forth with his spiritual keys from 
the simple stories of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and 
Joseph, The second consideration is this, the utter 
impossibility of putting a coherent, consistent spirit- 
ual sense into something somebody else had written 
ages ago. Try it on Homer, or Virgil, or Livy, or 
the Arabian Nights, or the Koran, and you will see 
the absurdity of the attempt. 

Homer's Odyssey and Ovid's Metamorphoses con- 
tain a great many fragments of the ancient myths 
under w^hich the spiritual wisdom of the post-dilu- 
vian Church was concealed, but they are so perverted 
and corrupted that it is impossible to draw any co- 
herent system of spiritual truth out of them.. They 
only prove, what Swedenborg states, that the ancient 
peoples of Asia spoke and wrote according to the 
science of correspondences, which science was lost, 
and can only be found again in perfect preservation 
in the imperishable records of the Word of God. 

So truly is the Word of God the only book in the 
world written according to correspondences, that the 
existence of two senses, spiritual and natural, uner- 
ringly fitting into each other, and the hidden sense 
openable by the key of correspondences, is the only 
test of the authority of a book claiming to be divine, 
the only proof that it really descended from the 



THE BOOK OPENED. 253 

spiritual to the natural sphere. It is a matter of 
indifference when or by whom the pentateuch was 
written, or whether such a man as Daniel ever ex- 
isted, when we can draw the profoundest mysteries 
of the spiritual life from the writings left under 
those names. We know they are a part of the Word 
of God for that reason alone. They answer to the 
key of correspondences. 

By the same test we know which books of the 
heterogeneous collection bound up as the Bible are 
divine books and which are not. The key which 
gives such heavenly responses when applied to the 
two books of the Kings and the Psalms, gives no 
answer whatever when applied to the Chronicles and 
the book of Proverbs. We know immediately that 
the Chronicles is some Hebrew writing without the 
divine sanction, and the Proverbs only a good col- 
lection of the scattered gems of human wisdom. The 
same test, which, applied to Matthew and the Apoc- 
alypse, instantly floods the mind with spiritual light, 
is altogether barren of results when applied to the 
Acts of the Apostles and to the Epistles. The 
former was a mere external sketch of events like 
any other human history, and the latter were pious 
and instructive pastoral letters written to the 
churches by apostles filled with the spirit of Christ, 

22 



254 THE E] VD OF THE WORLD. 

but not composed in such a manner as to constitute a 
genuine portion of the Word of God. The false doc- 
trines of the Church have been markedly drawn 
from a few sentences in these epistles and have no 
foundation in the truly inspired Word. 

The sum total is this. The Word of God is estab- 
lished forever in the heavens, and is the food and 
life of angels. The spiritual ideas contained in the 
Word, abstracted from persons, places, and things, 
are taught and preached in the better life. These 
ideas are now revealed in general terms to mankind 
through Swedenborg. The heavens are thereby 
opened : the angels are with us : Christ descends 
upon us : the new Jerusalem begins. 

It is not to be credited for a moment that Sweden- 
borg's statement of the spiritual sense exhausts it, 
or is a finality upon the subject. The interior mean- 
ings of every verse expand with the spiritual heights 
to which we ascend, for the Word is infinite. A 
good spirit sees more in any given passage than a 
good man upon earth can see. An angel of the 
ultimate heaven sees still more; the spiritual angel 
rises to grander heights ; and the wisdom of the 
celestial angel on the subject is so great as to be in- 
comprehensible to minds in lower spheres. These 
were the words which Paul heard and which it was 



THE BOOK OPENED. 255 

unlawful, that is, impossible by organic laws, to 
speak. Swedenborg received the spiritual sense, as 
every man must do, according to his own spiritual 
states, and he gave it such ultimate or literal expres- 
sion as he could, as a new basis for the future faith 
of the church. There will no doubt be infinite un- 
foldings and revealings hereafter in every direction, 
superior and different, but never in contradiction to 
the fundamental principles laid down, under divine 
guidance, by the Seer of the New Church. 

The literal sense is merely an outer line of de- 
fences from which the armies of scientism and ration- 
alism have already driven the christian host at every 
point. If there be only the letter the whole is lost. 
But, christians ! there is an interior line of defences, 
hitherto invisible even to yourselves. That line is 
immovable, impregnable, and eternal. The weapons 
which prevailed against the outer line are here to- 
tally useless. The questions are entirely different ; 
the old points are conceded, or settled, or ignored. 
The new light which streams from this inner wall 
strikes the fiercest enemy to the ground and converts 
him into the tenderest friend. 

There are many passages of the Word in which 
the existence of the spiritual sense is clearly stated 
or implied, the falsification of divine truth by literal 



256 THE EJSB 0F THE WOBLD. 

or sensuous interpretation positively declared and 
deprecated, and the prediction of an unfolding of 
the hidden meaning, an opening of the Book plainly- 
made. These things have been overlooked or misin- 
terpreted by the Church, because it had no key to 
the solution of spiritual mysteries. The twenty- 
ninth chapter of Isaiah contains one of these won- 
derful prophecies. Let us briefly examine those 
verses which constitute the key-notes of the subject. 

" And I will camp against thee round about, and will 
lay siege against thee with a mount, and I will' raise forts 
against thee^ 

Here the Lord declares He will make war upon 
the doctrinal system of the Church, under the figure 
of a besieged city. He will explore it, surround it, 
assail it with higher and more powerful truths. 
Divine truth opposed to error brings it into judg- 
ment, exposes its falsity and reveals its true char- 
acter. Therefore the Word proceeds: 

" And thou shalt be brought down, and thou shalt 
speak out of the ground ; and thy speech shall be low out 
of the dust, and thy voice shall be, as of one that hath a 
familiar spirit, out of the ground, and thy speech shall 
whisper out of the dusty 

The doctrinal teachings of the Church, when ex- 



THE BOOK OPENED, 257 

plored by the light of divine truth, appear alto- 
gether literal, external, low and sensuous, as if dic- 
tated by grovelling or familiar spirits. Those who 
believe them take the false for the true, and are like 
men who dream. 

" It shall even be as when a hungry man dreameth, and 
behold, he eateth ; but he awaketh and his soul is empty ; 
or as when a thirsty man dreameth, and behold, he drink- 
eth : but he aicaketh, and behold he is faint. 11 

The christian Church of to-day, based upon a 
literal interpretation of the Bible, is in this con- 
dition, speaking from the ground, whispering from 
the dust, dreaming that it eats and drinks, and is 
satisfied with goodness and wisdom. If it ever 
awakes from that hateful dream, engendered by the 
sensuous philosophy of life and nature, it will find 
itself hungry and thirsty and faint and destitute. 
The Word goes on to describe its condition : 

11 Stay yourselves and wonder : cry ye out and cry : 
they are drunken but not with wine : they stagger, but not 
with strong drink. 

" For the Lord hath 'poured out upon you the spirit 
of deep sleep and hath closed 'your eyes : the prophets and 
your rulers, the seers, hath he covered. 

" And the vision of all is become unto you as the words 

of a book that is sealed, which men deliver to one that is 
r 22* 



258 THE END 0F THE world. 

learned, saying, Read this, I pray thee : and he saith, I 
cannot, for it is sealed : 

" And the book is delivered to him that is not learned, 
saying, Read this, I pray thee : and he saith, I am not 
learned. 11 

Poor modern christians! staggering, incoherent, 
and bewildered under your terrible load of false doc- 
trines, with closed eyes and deep sleep as to genuine 
spiritual truth; in vain you wonder and cry, and 
give the Word of God to your priests and clergy, as 
ignorant as yourselves, and beg them to draw light 
for you from its sacred pages ! Alas ! it is a sealed 
book to you all ; nor can it be opened to any one but 
by the power of Jesus Christ, who is the Word made 
flesh. 

It is because the Church is based on the letter and 
not the spirit, that there is so much mouth service 
and lip service, and so little heart service; so much 
morality and so little spirituality ; so much religi- 
osity and so little religion ; and a fear towards God 
" taught by the precept of men" — a sensuous, tradi- 
tional, ecclesiastical religion, and not one flowing 
from the spiritual truths of heaven. The Lord, 
however, promises deliverance from this condition. 

" There/ore, behold, I will proceed to do a marvellous 
work among this people, even a marvellous work and a 



THE BOOK OPENED. 259 

wonder : for the wisdom of their wise men shall perish , 
and the understanding of their prudent men shall be hid" 

This "marvellous work and a wonder" is the 
opening of the sealed book, the revelation of the 
spiritual sense of the Word of God, as it has been 
made through the mediumship of Swedenborg. 
Nothing else could bring the wisdom of the wise 
men of the old Church to naught, or make the 
understanding of their prudent men to pass out of 
sight. Nothing else could right that " turning of 
things upside down," that inversion of true Chris- 
tianity, which the christian Church has effected. 
Nothing else could turn Lebanon into a fruitful 
field, or bring down our highest spiritual affections 
into the most useful, practical activities, in compari- 
son with which " the fruitful field" of the former 
dispensation " shall be esteemed as a forest," or as a 
mere wooded waste. That all this is caused by the 
opening of the Word is evident from the context. 

" And in that day shall the deaf hear the words of the 
book, and the eyes of the blind shall see out of obscurity, 
and out of darkness. 

" They also that erred in spirit shall come to under- 
standing, and they that murmured shall learn doctrine." 

The effect of the opening of the spiritual sense of 



260 THE END 0F TEE woeld. 

the Word is judgment, judgment upon the Church 
and upon the individual. Therefore the prophet 
declares in this connection, that the terrible one, the 
evil and false, shall be brought to naught, the scorner 
shall be consumed, the watcher for iniquity shall be 
cut off, while the meek shall increase their joy, and 
the poor among men, the poor in spirit, shall rejoice 
in the Holy One of Israel, the Lord. He says also 
that Jacob, the external Church upon earth, of which 
Israel is the spiritual principle, shall no longer be 
ashamed, " neither shall his face now wax pale," that 
is, he shall no longer seem sickly or lifeless as he is 
to-day, but his countenance shall be ruddy and beau- 
tiful from the influence of spiritual truth. 

Swedenborg's mission was to open the Word of 
God. The evidence of the mission is the fact that 
he has executed it. The opening of the spiritual 
sense is the proof, the miracle, the test, the seal of 
authority. None other is needed. It invites rational 
inspection. The claims of Swedenborg lie all in the 
fact or the fallacy of the spiritual sense. It may 
seem vague and uncertain to those who investigate it 
from mere curiosity, like the Jews who required a 
sign of our Lord ; or to those who attempt to pene- 
trate it, full of the prejudices of their own foregone 
conclusions, and designing to submit it to the test of 



THE BOOK OPENED. 261 

their already established opinions. But those who 
seek the truth for the sake of the truth itself, and 
are willing to sacrifice everything for its possession, 
will find a true light in the midst of our great dark- 
ness, and that star which leads to the cradle of the 
new Christ who shall reign forever. 

The collateral light which Swedenborg throws 
upon the spiritual world, the nature of the soul and 
the philosophy of life here and hereafter, is exceed- 
ingly interesting and instructive, but it is all subor- 
dinate and secondary to the great object of his mis- 
sion. The man who has revealed the wonders of 
the spiritual sense of the Word of God may be 
safely trusted in all minor things. Whatever he 
has said about heaven and hell, the world of spirits 
and the life after death may be received with im- 
plicit faith, as valuable and practical details, nat- 
urally and logically supplementing and illustrating 
the glorious system of spiritual truth which he has 
drawn, as a humble medium of the divine power, 
from the living Word. 

The spiritual sense will not only explain and har- 
monize all the difficulties and discrepancies of the 
letter ; it will unitize the entire christian world in 
the knowledge of divine things and in the energies 
of the christian life. It is the inner garment of 



262 THE END 0F THE WORLD. 

Christ which is without seam and cannot be divided. 
There can be no contentions about its meaning. It 
will increase the influxes of heavenly love and wis- 
dom in the believer's heart sevenfold. (Isaiah xxx. 
26.) 

" Moreover the light of the moon shall be as the light of 
the sun , and the light of the sun shall be sevenfold, as the 
light of seven days, in the day that the Lord bindeth up 
the breach of his people, and healeth the stroke of their 
wound" 

The "breach" is the separation of the spiritual 
from the literal sense of the Word, and the conse- 
quent divorce or want of correspondence between the 
spiritual and natural spheres of the christian life. 
The evils resulting are the " wound" of which the 
Church is to be healed by that divine revelation 
which shows how the spiritual and literal senses are 
connected together. 

The spiritual sense will be the motor power of a 
higher and holier civilization, for our present civili- 
zation is thoroughly diseased and about to perish. Its 
acceptance means the spiritualization of all things, of 
religion, philosophy, science, politics and business, 
education and marriage, and of the minutest details 
relating to the practical life of man. It will meet and 



THE BOOK OPENED. 263 

solve with supernal wisdom all the difficult and ter- 
rible problems of the age. The precious germs of 
thought which will reorganize and redeem our social 
life will be drawn from its bosom. It will teach that 
mighty, uncomprehended truth, that personal salva- 
tion is only to be found in disinterested labors for the 
salvation of the race. It will bring about the abso- 
lute and total emergence of all individual interests 
in the public good. It will be the bond of union 
in the commune of Christ. It is the means of the 
second coming of the Lord. 

When shall these glorious things, these loftiest 
ideals of all the ages, come to pass ? When shall 
the old heavens depart as a scroll, and the old earth 
be burned up forever ? When shall the new heavens 
and the new earth, or the perfect adjustment of the 
best and highest internal and external relations, be 
inaugurated in our midst ? 



CHAPTER X. 

THE JUDGMENT AND ITS EFFECTS. 

fTlHE final and perfect form of human society, 
-■- which will constitute the new heaven and the 
new earth, would be established very soon if the 
doctrines taught from the spiritual sense by Sweden- 
borg were speedily and generally accepted through- 
out the world. That, however, is utterly impossible. 
It is a law that the more advanced the thought, the 
more bitter the opposition, and the tardier its recep- 
tion. The more elevated and spiritual a truth, the 
more certain it is that men will misconceive, despise, 
and reject it. And yet, as Wilkinson beautifully 
expresses it, "thoughts beyond the reaches of our 
souls to-day, are a new soul in our souls to-morrow, 
when the Lord, the Revealer, pleases." 

The rational, scientific, and skeptical world pays 
no attention to Swedenborg or his disciples, because 
they regard his system as a mere branch of the 
already condemned and effete Christianity. To teach 

the divinity of Jesas Christ and the plenary inspir- 

264 



THE JUDGMENT AND ITS EFFECTS. 265 

ation of the Bible, is to exclude all inquiry and in- 
terest from that quarter. The christian world, im- 
bedded, we may say, petrified in the doctrines of the 
literal sense, and satisfied with all its foregone con- 
clusions, gives him no serious hearing, justifying 
itself as coolly, and with sublime unconsciousness 
of its folly, as if the spiritual sense of the Word of 
God was on a level with the Koran or the book of 
Mormon. 

Divine truth cannot descend into the mind unless 
it is prepared for it, yearning for it, praying for it. 
The consummated Church is careless, indifferent, 
asleep, paralyzed. It can imagine no truth higher 
than that it possesses. It is quite satisfied with its 
own models of piety. It has no doubts of itself or 
of its acceptance with God ; no unsatisfied longings, 
no divine despairs. It can never find Swedenborg 
until it awakes, doubts, fears, agonizes, and calls and 
prays for him, or for somebody like him. Individ- 
uals are finding him that way every day. The 
Church will welcome him at last. It will never see 
the Lord until it does. It is now in that condition 
described by Christ : 

" Behold , your house is left unto you desolate. 

11 For I say unto you, Ye shall not see me henceforth 
M 23 



266 THE END 0F THE world. 

till ye say, Blessed is he that cometh in the name of the 
Lord: 1 Matt, xxiii. 38-39. 

The answers of the christian clergy to the claims 
of the heavenly doctrines revealed through Sweden- 
borg, correspond exactly to the answers of the ancient 
Masters in Israel to the claim of our Lord at His 
first coming. 

" We know that God spake unto Moses, but as for this 
fellow, we know not whence he is." 

" Say we not well that thou art a Samaritan and hast 
a devil?" 

" And many of them said, He hath a devil and is 
mad : why hear ye him ? " 

" From whence hath this man these things ? and what 
wisdom is this which is given unto him t" 

" Save any of the rulers or of the Pharisees believed 
on him ?" 

There is another transcendent reason why the 
spiritual sense of the Word of God is unknown to 
the vast majority in Christendom. The concealments 
of the divine providence are wonderful and merci- 
ful, dictated by the infinite wisdom. Only they who 
have ears to hear can hear what the spirit saith. 
The spiritual sense is like the woman hidden in the 
wilderness " for a time and times and half a time," 
hidden " from the face of the serpent," that is, pro- 



THE JUDGMENT AND ITS EFFECTS. 267 

tected from exploration by the sensuous and scientific 
thought, the wisdom of the serpent, with which we 
examine external phenomena. Such an examination 
would most frequently lead to its rejection, and its 
rejection would lead to deeper condemnation. The 
doctrine of the Lord Jesus Christ as taught by Swe- 
denborg is " the man-child" which was brought forth 
with so much pain and difficulty, and which was 
snatched away and concealed from the enemies which 
stood ready to devour. 

For these reasons this great source of spiritual 
renovation, the spiritual sense, notwithstanding its 
infinite possibilities for the future, has so far been 
but feebly and faintly manifested in the world. The 
same light has, however, been revealed in the world 
of spirits above and around us, and there its influ- 
ences have been enormous and triumphant, and are 
now being reflected downwards upon the world of 
man and nature. This other tremendous source of 
spiritual light, attending, illustrating, and facilitating 
the second coming of the Lord, is described by 
Christ Himself in the following language: 

" Wherefore if they shall say unto you. Behold, he is 
in the desert, go not forth : behold, he is in the secret 
chambers, believe it not. 

11 For as the lightning cometh out of the east and 



268 THE END 0F THE world. 

shineth even unto the west, so shall also the coming of the 
Son of Man be : 

" For wheresoever the carcase is, there will the eagles be 
gathered together' 1 

How barren and almost meaningless are these 
words in the letter ! How significant and instructive 
when seen in the light of the spiritual sense ! Our 
Lord had just reiterated His warning against the 
false Christs and false prophets who should deceive 
His Church. He knew they w T ould lead it so far 
astray that they would not recognize Him at His 
second coming, or know how or where to look for 
Him. He tells them that the true Christ or the 
divine truth will not be found in the desert places 
of the Church, in the empty, lifeless, fruitless 
dogmas of faith ; nor yet in the secret chambers of 
the Church, in its inner life and bosom, for not 
knowing His true character and mission, they have 
no genuine conception of the spiritual life, no fitness 
for being wrought as organic elements into the coming 
commune of Christ. He cannot descend to them, 
or appear to them through these corrupted church- 
organizations, to which they cling so tenaciously, 
but which really oppose and exclude the light of 
heaven. 

The spiritual truths of the new life cannot obtain 



THE JUDGMENT AND ITS EFFECTS. 269 

a foothold in the minds and hearts of men, until 
there is a great and general illumination of the in- 
terior forms of the human spirit, described as the 
lightning shining from the east even unto the west. 
This great illumination comes from the spiritual 
world. It began about the middle of the last cen- 
tury, when the spiritual sense of the Word was re- 
vealed, and has been going on ever since with in- 
creasing rapidity. It extends to the whole race, 
from those whose affections are in the east, or nearest 
to the Lord, to those who are in the uttermost west 
or farthest from Him, each man receiving spiritual 
light according to his capacity and desire. 

The disciples, bewildered at all the accumulated 
and apparently unconnected signs of His coming, 
exclaimed, Where, Lord ? His answer, " where the 
body or carcase is, thither will the eagles be gathered 
together," means that wherever there are dead forms, 
dead churches, dead institutions, dead affections, 
there will be spiritual truths, the eagles, gathered 
over and about them, ready to infuse new life into 
them all. If one in the world of spirits when 
thinking of the Church should see a carcase and 
vultures gathered about it, he would know that they 
represented a dead Church with the ecclesiastical 

harpies or birds of prey feasting and fattening on 

23* 



270 THE END 0F THE WORLD. 

its corruptions. This also is true to-day. If he saw 
eagles about it, which are spiritual truths of the 
highest order, he would be assured of the resuscitation 
and resurrection of the life of the Church, or what 
is the same thing, the establishment of a new one, 
based upon higher, purer, and more vital principles. 

The lightning which is now shining everywhere 
from the east to the west, is a new and great influx 
of ideas, thoughts, feelings, powers, flowing from the 
world of spirits into the world of human thought ; 
a vast, subtle, secret, spiritual force, stimulating every 
department of human activity, silently breaking up 
the old foundations, letting in new light everywhere 
and upon every subject, revealing to men that their 
old institutions, civil and social, their old churches, 
their old modes of faith and forms of life are mere 
dead things, carcasses, in comparison with something 
living and spiritual that is fast coming to reorganize 
and perfect the world.' 

What are the causes of this great change ? Why 
did not the same things occur in the dark ages or in 
the seventeenth century? Some one will say, are 
not the wonderful advancements and agitations of 
modern times the natural and legitimate results of 
causes long in operation, and only acquiring a very 
great momentum in the last hundred years? Not 



THE JUDGMENT AND ITS EFFECTS. 271 

altogether so. It would be needless to enter into 
historical and statistical considerations of the sub- 
ject, but I would call attention to some great facts 
which cannot be disputed. The stimulus derived 
from the revival of the ancient literatures and from 
contact with the Mahometan power had exhausted 
itself, and could carry the mind no farther, for 
thought, like water, cannot rise above the level of 
the fountain from which it flows. The old stimulus 
derived from the religious idea had also been ex- 
pended, and the churches were sunk into a state of 
apathy and degradation which has never been paral- 
leled in the history of Christianity. Science had 
made no advance of importance for a hundred years. 
The fine arts, philosophy, literature were at their 
lowest ebb in all the countries of Europe. Manners 
and morals were fearfully corrupted. Despotism had 
full sway throughout the world. A period of stag- 
nation and decay seemed impending over the w T hole 
human race. Protestantism was notoriously as im- 
potent as Catholicism to elevate the race any longer. 

This was the period of which Carlyle gives the 
following emphatic opinion : 

"A century so opulent in accumulated falsities, 
sad opulence descending on it by inheritance, always 
at compound interest, and always largely increased 



272 THE END OF THE WORLD. 

by fresh acquirement on such immensity of standing 
capital, opulent in that bad way as never Century 
before was ! Which had no longer the conscious- 
ness of being false, so false had it grown ; and was 
so steeped in falsity and impregnated with it to the 
very bone, that, in fact, the measure of the thing w T as 
full, and a French Revolution had to end it." 

"The eighteenth Century has nothing grand in 
it, except that grand universal Suicide, named 
French Revolution, by which it terminated its 
otherwise most worthless existence, with at least 
one worthy act, setting fire to its old home and self, 
and going up in flames and volcanic explosions in a 
truly memorable manner. A very fit termination 
for such a Century ! Century spendthrift, fraudu- 
lent-bankrupt, without real money of performance 
in its pocket, and the shops declining to take hypoc- 
risies and speciosities any farther." 

" There was need once more of a Divine Revela- 
tion to the torpid, frivolous children of men, if they 
were not to sink altogether into the ape condition." 

Between the middle and the end of the last cen- 
tury an astonishing change took place in human 
affairs. An extraordinary impetus, from some un- 
known source or sources, was given to every depart- 
ment of human thought and action. Religious 
revivals, a genuine renaissance of the religious life, 
beginning with the rise of the great Methodist 



THE JUDGMENT AND ITS EFFECTS. 273 

communion, gradually took possession of all the 
churches, including especially the Roman Catholic. 
This awakening probably affected all the religions 
of the world in its remotest corners, the phenomena 
varying with each religion and the people who pro- 
fessed it. Literature also started into new life and 
has run up to this day a career of unequalled splen- 
dor. Philosophy awoke from its long sleep. The 
torpor and mediocrity of the preceding centuries dis- 
appeared, and the genius of man blazed out as never 
before in every conceivable direction. The last cen- 
tury has remodelled the face of the earth. Seeds 
were then planted which will grow forever. 

Democratic and republican principles sprang into 
sudden activity, and the American and French revo- 
lutions resulted. From that time to this we have 
seen free governments established in the place of 
odious and oppressive monarchies, the enlargement 
of individual rights, the extension of free thought, 
the growth of a powerful and wholesome spirit of 
inquiry, the rise of a free press, the abolition of 
slaveries, the organization of all the great philan- 
thropies, the rapid spread of education, the eleva- 
tion of the masses, the development of the co-opera- 
tive and associative spirit throughout the civilized 
world, and the deep implantation in the human 



274 THE END OF THE WORLD. 

heart of those abused but still sacred words, liberty, 
equality, fraternity. 

Witness also the enormous improvements in the 
physical sphere of existence. Chemistry and physi- 
ology were born ; electricity and magnetism were re- 
discovered and utilized. The mighty forces of iron 
and steam were applied to the uses of manufacture 
and commerce. See also the wonderful impetus 
given to the invention of machinery and to the per- 
fection of the sciences; the creation of new indus- 
tries; the immense improvements in all the beautiful 
and useful arts ; the rapidly advancing annihilation 
of time and space by railroads, steamships, tele- 
graphs, and telephones ; the mighty extension of the 
physical comforts of the human race, and such varied 
conquests over nature that man almost trembles to 
conceive the possibilities of the future. 

The tendencies of the first half of the eighteenth 
century were all downward; the tendencies of the 
last half of that century were all upward ; and with 
an ever-increasing spring forward, still in progress, 
which has never been witnessed in the history of the 
human race. An adequate cause for all these things 
is assigned in the fact that what the christian world 
calls the judgment took place in the world of spirits 
in the year 1757, and effected such a change of rela- 



THE JUDGMENT AND ITS EFFECTS. 275 

tion between that world and this, that the inspira- 
tions of spiritual light have passed more directly 
and powerfully into the human mind, constituting 
that lightning which cometh out of the east and 
shineth even unto the west. Thenceforth a Divine 
Revelation which Carlyle and others have altogether 
failed to see, began upon earth and has been unfold- 
ing ever since. 

We have seen that there cannot possibly be any 
destruction of the physical globe; that the heaven 
and earth to pass away are the present religious and 
civil institutions of the world ; that the resurrection 
of the dead is not a resurrection of dead bodies, but 
something which has been occurring for the last 
hundred years, a resurrection of the human mind 
from the old dead issues of the past into the un- 
ceasing activities of a spiritual life; and that the 
second coming of Christ is not a personal appearance, 
but a new revelation of His spirit by the unfolding 
of His Divine Word, and the descent of new spirit- 
ual powers to reanimate, guide, and exalt the life of 
man. In perfect harmony with these conclusions is 
the statement, that the last judgment is a spiritual 
phenomenon, impossible in the world of nature, 
which has already taken place in the world of spirits. 

That the reader may comprehend the nature and 



276 THE END OF THE WORLD, 

effects of the last judgment, I beg him to accept 
provisionally as true, some statements made by Swe- 
denborg, the only historian of the other life, as to 
the organic structure of the spiritual world. 

The spiritual world, although not composed of 
material elements, is a world of substances and forms 
as real and solid to the spirit as our world is to us. 
The material world indeed is a materialization from 
the spiritual world and is cast in the mould of its 
forms. Therefore that w r orld has its sun, its earth, 
its mountains, seas, skies, animals, floral kingdoms, 
associations, cities, governments, laws, worship, arts, 
and sciences, indeed every thing which exists in this 
world, and a vast deal more of which the human 
imagination has never conceived. 

Where is this spiritual world? In darker ages 
men located it in the higher regions of the atmos- 
phere, in the sun, in the sidereal abysses, in some 
great central orb afar off round which all the created 
universe revolves. They even attempted in later 
times to measure its distance by the flight of the 
angel Gabriel to Daniel (ninth chapter, twenty-first 
verse), presuming the movement of the angel to have 
been as rapid as light ! All this is inexpressibly ab- 
surd, when we reflect that spirit and matter, however 
contiguous, are never continuous. No rarefaction of 



THE JUDGMENT AND ITS EFFECTS. 277 

matter can ever produce spirit: no explorations in 
space can ever discover heaven. The time for reason- 
ing about such matters is past. Intuitions from the 
spiritual world itself are now teaching all men that 
we are in the spiritual and the natural worlds our- 
selves at the same time : that spiritual influences and 
beings are all around us, above us, and within us. 
To drop the natural degree, as at death, is to be at 
once in the spiritual degree. 

Hear one of the editors of the Christian Union 
(April 21, 1880, page 372), formulating the coming 
creed of the whole world as to the proximity of 
spirits : 

" They are all ministering spirits : we live and 
walk in the midst of them. If our ears were ad- 
justed to such delicate music, we might hear their 
songs. If our eyes were not so gross and sensuous 
we might perceive their now invisible forms. The 
picture of a long rest, the soul living unclad or 
asleep, or waiting in some reception room of heaven 
for its habiliments, presents far more difficulties to 
the reverent student of Scripture, than the view 
which holds that the judgment day has already 
dawned ; that the dead are passing in a continuous 
procession from earth to God's judgment bar ; that 
death and resurrection are simultaneous; that the 
separation between earth and heaven is a narrow 

24 



278 THE END 0F THE world. 

partition and death is but the swinging of the door ; 
and that the dead are living, more truly living than 
we, and living often close at hand ; so close that the 
evil spirits breathe into our souls pestiferous imagi- 
nations and blasphemous thoughts ; so close too that 
mothers still keep watch and ward over their chil- 
dren, and the friend still serves by subtle influences 
as guide and inspiration to his friend." 

Swedenborg declared, a hundred and thirty years 
ago, that the spiritual world, although invisible to 
the natural eye, interpenetrates the natural world 
everywhere, and animates it like a soul animating a 
body ; that we all live in both worlds at the same 
time, having a spiritual body encased and concealed 
in our natural body ; having double senses, twofold 
eyesight, hearing, taste, smell, and touch, one set 
spiritual and the other set natural. He declared also 
that although we are unconscious of our inner life 
in our ordinary states, we might be made conscious 
of it by the simple opening of our spiritual senses. 
They being opened, we might see into the spiritual 
world, hear its inhabitants talk and talk with them, 
examine by touch every object about them, and lead 
a double conscious life, one here and one there, as he 
himself did for thirty years, as the first inhabitants 
of the world did for many centuries, and as any man 



THE JUDGMENT AND ITS EFFECTS. 279 

may do at the present time, if God wills, and all with- 
out the least violation of spiritual or natural laws, but 
rather as exhibiting their consentaneous operation. 

How strange it is that people who profess to be- 
lieve the Bible can entertain the least doubt as to 
the truth of these things ! Have they forgotten that 
Adam walked and talked with Jehovah in the gar- 
den, that Moses beheld on the mount " the pattern 
of things in the heavens," that Balaam was the 
seer, or " the man with his eyes open," that com- 
munication with spirits is plainly possible because it 
is absolutely prohibited in the Scriptures? that the 
young man after his eyes were opened beheld chariots 
and horses about Elisha that were invisible before, 
that spirits innumerable have entered the bodies of 
men so as to speak and act through them as passive 
mediums, that Moses and Elias were seen in their 
spiritual bodies by the disciples on the mount, that 
Paul went up to the third heaven without leaving 
his chamber, and that Isaiah, Ezekiel, Zachariah, 
John, and others had their spiritual senses opened 
while still living upon earth, so as to report things 
occurring in the interior life, not as dreams or vain 
imaginations, but as things actually seen and heard? 
Is it because christians have divorced the Father 
from the Son, our spiritual nature from our human 



280 THE END OF THE WORLD. 

nature, the spiritual sense from the literal, and the 
spiritual world from the natural world, that they 
doubt or deny the divine spiritualism which perme- 
ates the Word of God ? 

These great spiritual powers which are reanimat- 
ing the whole race and are the secrets of its progress, 
do not flow directly into us from heaven or hell, but 
from an intermediate world, the world of spirits, 
into which we all go at death. Heaven is the final 
home of all those good spirits who have become per- 
fect images and likenesses of Christ. Hell is the 
final home of the incorrigibly and irreclaimably 
wicked. Men are rarely so perfect as to ascend at 
once into heaven or so utterly evil as to sink at once 
into hell. They live for a greater or less time in the 
world of spirits in societies and under governments, 
w T hereby their true characters are developed, and 
they are prepared, from the beginnings made in 
their earth-life, for eternal consociation with their 
like. This is no purgatory, as the catholics suppose, 
but a vast, necessary, organic phase of spiritual evo- 
lution, preparing the soul by explorations, separa- 
tions, and judgments, according to spiritual laws, for 
heaven or hell. — "After death, the judgment," said 
the great apostle. 

Individual judgments are always going on, and 



THE JUDGMENT AND ITS EFFECTS. 281 

individuals are always passing out of the world of 
spirits to their final abodes. But during the many 
centuries which each one of the past dispensations 
has lasted, many millions would remain in the world 
of spirits in mixed states of good and evil, building 
up for themselves imaginary heavens, and becoming 
more and more fixed in their mental and moral life. 
Now the influx from heaven passes through the world 
of spirits to men, as really and organically as the 
waters from the western Allegheny slopes must pass 
through the Missiasippi valley before they can reach 
the sea. The consequence is that the spiritual states 
of the inhabitants of the intermediate world assist 
or obstruct the light of heaven as it descends to men. 
When an immense residue of souls in that mixed 
state block up the avenues of divine influx, the 
dispensation upon earth approaches its end, the 
Church becomes more and more feeble and corrupt, 
an incubus lies upon the spiritual life of man, all 
things languish, and all things would literally stag- 
nate and perish, did not the Lord execute a general 
judgment in the world of spirits, which liberates 
our world from the deadening, conservative pressure 
above it, removes all obstructions, and lets down new 
light from heaven, constituting a new revelation and 

a new Church upon earth. 

24* 



282 THE END 0F THE WORLD. 

A general judgment therefore occurs at the end 
of every dispensation, and is soon followed by as- 
tonishing effects upon the earth. The world of 
spirits is comparatively emptied out, and heaven and 
hell are brought nearer to man. The consequence 
is, that new vitality is imparted to every form of 
goodness and a new intensification of all evil becomes 
apparent everywhere. The present state of the world, 
exhibiting both of these extremes, is the effect of the 
last judgment which occurred in 1757, and of which 
Swedenborg was an eye-witness, who saw many of 
the scenes prophetically described in the Apocalypse 
enacted and fulfilled in the most perfect manner. 

The judgment, which was produced by divine 
truth being revealed in the world of spirits, and 
contending there with infernal falsities, is thus de- 
scribed by John : 

" And there was war in heaven : Michael and his 
angels fought against the dragon : and the dragon fought 
and Ms angels : 

" And prevailed not : neither was their place found any 
more in heaven; 

" And the great dragon was cast out, that old serpent, 
called the Devil and Satan, which deceiveth the whole 
world : he was cast out into the earth and his angels were 
cast out with him." Rev. xii. 7-9. 



THE JUDGMENT AND ITS EFFECTS. 283 

This " heaven" was the ecclesiastical sphere of the 
intermediate state or world of spirits. Michael and 
his angels were divine truths revealed from the gen- 
uine heaven above. The dragon and his angels are 
evils and falsities concealed under the forms of re- 
ligion. To be cast out into the earth is to have 
them exposed in their true nature as low, base, and 
sensual. 

Our Lord executed a similar judgment upon the 
spiritual residue of the Jewish Church during His 
earthly life in Judea. That was the meaning in- 
volved in His saying that the prince of this world 
was now judged and cast out, and that He saw Satan 
like lightning fall from heaven. The effects of that 
great event in the world of spirits upon the world of 
nature beneath were enormous. We may include 
among them the downfall of the old religions, the 
closure of the oracles, the destruction of Jerusalem, 
the dispersion of the Jew r s, and the great moral 
triumphs of Christianity, contrasted with the terrible 
development of sensuality and crime throughout the 
Roman empire which hastened its final destruction. 

Why does Swedenborg call the wonderful scenes 
he witnessed in the world of spirits in the year 1757 
the last Judgment? Because the fulness of time has 
come, the prophecies are fulfilled, the ends of the 



284 THE END 0F THE WORLD. 

world are upon us, the great book is opened, Christ 
has come again, the material basis is laid for a per- 
petual Church. There can be no more dispensations, 
and as spiritual truth is now revealed as the judge, 
there will be no more accumulations in the world of 
spirits requiring another general judgment. Sweden - 
borg says that individual judgments now proceed in 
the world of spirits with great rapidity, and that in 
no case does man remain there for more than a single 
generation. In relation to this important fact the 
eloquent Wilkinson remarks : 

"The declaration of men as interiorly good or 
evil takes place rapidly now, and their places are 
allotted accordingly. The world of spirits is no 
longer a senile and aged state full of the established 
and unwholesome past, but is constantly full of 
young blood, constantly cleared of passing materials, 
permeable to heaven and hell in great rivers of life, 
in streaming multitudes of individuals. Its bands 
and states and churches are completely traversed by 
the one government of the Lord. Where before it 
was a thick superposition of stratified ages fifty-five 
generations deep, it is now the thinnest of layers, in 
fact of the depth of one generation." (Human 
Science and Divine Revelation, page 418.) 

Emerson, himself an unbeliever, says that the 
religion and philosophy of the present day are be- 



THE JUDGMENT AND ITS EFFECTS. 285 

coming more and more Swedenborgianized. It is 
very seldom however from Swedenborg that these 
advanced religionists and philosophers receive their 
illumination. If Emerson had said that the spirit- 
ual doctrines of the Word of God were now taught 
to every new T -comer into the other life, and that all 
the good people who pass from this world into the 
world of spirits were rapidly Swedenborgianized, 
he would have touched the secret of the amazing 
changes of thought and opinion going on around us. 
It is our best orthodox friends who have gone before 
us, and received the enlightenment in that world 
which they rejected in this, w T ho now would draw us 
to their new stand-points, and so move us with 
doubts, shake us with fears, lead us to more inde- 
pendent thoughts and inquiries, and are silently un- 
dermining the old foundations of faith. 

"From this centre," says Wilkinson, "for the 
most part unconsciously, a steady wave of private 
and public humanity presses down against unright- 
eousness : a new fairness and honesty are affirmed ; 
the best interests of all sorts and conditions of men 
are successfully pleaded; and a new conscience over- 
comes old interests in reluctant senates. Flexibility 
succeeds flexibility, and new and greater views of 
truth and duty and work are propounded and ac- 
cepted. By these occurrences also the new theology 



286 THE END 0F THE WORLD. 

is established in action, and insinuated into thought 
long before its source is seen, and a way prepared for 
the acceptance of a true knowledge of the Lord who 
is doing it all." 

Ministers of the gospel have been first led to study 
Swedenborg by having been charged with preaching 
his doctrines to their congregations. Many men 
have been drawn by secret spiritual influences to 
the acceptance of opinions which they afterwards 
discovered were the tenets of the great Seer. A large 
number of minds are so organically prepared, no- 
body knows how, for the heavenly doctrines that 
they accept them as soon as they are presented. 
Thousands and perhaps millions of souls are now 
secretly hungering and thirsting for the spiritual 
food which is so near them, but which they cannot 
find. The ecclesiastical organizations with their in- 
flexible dogmas are the chief obstacles which stand 
between the christian mind and the great spiritual 
light of the Lord's second coming. The new heaven 
and the new earth are thus being prepared by two 
instrumentalities : one, the slow but steady growth 
of a visible Church, which zealously proclaims the 
spiritual sense of the Word and propagates the doc- 
trines of Swedenborg; the other, that great light 
from the spiritual world which is preparing the 



THE JUDGMENT AND ITS EFFECTS. 287 

human mind in all directions for a new faith and a 
new life. The two will meet and make one. 

Since the opening of Swedenborg's spiritual senses, 
the opening of the Divine Word which followed, 
and the grand removal of obstructions by the last 
judgment in the world of spirits, man has been able 
to penetrate into the minutest recesses of what we 
call nature in a manner never before possible. The 
wonders of electricity, magnetism, and electro-mag- 
netism were gradually unfolded. Oxygen gas was 
discovered, and chemistry proceeded to reveal the 
innumerable and beautiful secrets of the molecular 
constitution of nature. Instruments have been in- 
vented or perfected which seem to diminish or 
remove the obstacles of time and space; micro- 
scopes, telescopes, spectroscopes, telegraphs, tele- 
phones, phonographs, etc. Mesmerism or animal 
magnetism with its associated marvels of clairvoy- 
ance, thought-reading, transference of sensations, 
etc., has opened a path of light into the higher 
regions of physiology and psychology. And homoe- 
opathy, child of the purest experiment and observa- 
tion, has drawn the curative powers of nature from 
the incalculable depths of the infinitesimal. 

Great discoveries as well as great events are often 
the culminations of a process or processes which have 



288 THE END 0F THE WORLD. 

been going on in the general mind or in many minds 
for a long time, as the final result of influx from the 
spiritual world. 

To those who question the spiritual causes as- 
signed to natural phenomena, I would repeat one of 
the laws of the spiritual life, relating to the connec- 
tion between mind and matter. "The so-called 
forces of nature pre-exist in the spiritual world as 
spiritual forces, and become natural forces when they 
flow into physical molecules or material structures/ 
It is the outward appearance that everything de- 
velops spontaneously upward from a simple primor- 
dial substance. It is the genuine truth that spiritual 
forces and forms descend and clothe themselves with 
material garments. Everything comes from the 
spiritual world into the natural and reascends from 
the natural to the spiritual. It is like the two buck- 
ets in a well : the ascent of the one is dependent 
upon the descent of the other. 

This great idea is involved in the remarkable 
verse, " Hereafter ye shall see heaven open, and the 
angels of God ascending and descending upon the 
Son of Man." The ascending angels are natural 
truths, the descending angels are spiritual truths, 
and they start from and return to, or are centred in 
the Son of Man, because Jesus Christ, the Divine 



THE JUDGMENT AND ITS EFFECTS. 289 

Man, is the uncreated life, the beginning and the 
ending, the first and the last. This cannot be seen 
or understood until heaven is opened to us, or until 
our spiritual faculties are illumined, as they may 
be through the writings of Swedenborg, which 
contain the true spiritual philosophy of the uni- 
verse. 

The things above mentioned and many others 
have been undoubtedly preparatory steps, furnishing 
the physical or material basis for the descent of still 
subtler and more purely spiritual forces into the 
human mind and into nature. The astounding phe- 
nomena of spiritualism, utterly inexplicable on any 
theory hitherto offered, have followed. Beginning 
in the United States in 1845 in a very humble and 
almost absurd manner, and mingled and shadowed 
ever since by every conceivable form of fraud and 
imposture, they have spread over the globe, civilized 
and barbaric ; and notwithstanding the obstinate and 
irrational incredulity of the majority of churchmen 
and scientists, they continue to spread with progres- 
sively increasing and more and more surprising de- 
velopments, and will evidently constitute in the 
future one of the greatest powers in the world for 
good or evil. 

Spiritualism is the great arch enemy, the bite 
N t 25 



290 THE END 0F THE WORLD. 

noir, of orthodoxy and of materialism, for it im- 
pugns the veracity of both. It has proved to mil- 
lions of people what technical Christianity but 
vaguely realizes, that there is a life immediately 
after death, or rather that we never die at all, but 
only change our form from natural to spiritual con- 
ditions; that a great, wonderful, and beautiful spir- 
itual world interpenetrates the natural ; that spirits 
have spiritual bodies in all perfection, and need no 
recall of the old fleshly garments from the tomb ; 
that they are good and evil just as we are, and find 
themselves soon after death neither in heaven nor in 
hell ; that they influence our affections, thoughts, and 
actions in the most remarkable manner; that the 
spiritual world is pressing downwards or outwards 
into the natural ; that the spiritual senses of men 
are being gradually prepared for opening into the 
world of spirits ; and that all these things indicate 
some vast impending change in the physical and 
spiritual life of the race. 

"The worst feature of spiritism," says Dr. Wil- 
kinson, " is that it leads frivolous persons to ask 
Tom, Dick, and Harry of the spirit-life, what their 
views may be of God and the universe, and to give 
importance to the answers, because they are spoken 
from the presumed higher rostrum of the other life, 



THE JUDGMENT AND ITS EFFECTS. 291 

which may turn out to be impertinence from the 
spiritual pillory." 

Orthodoxy despises spiritualism because it trenches 
upon its own grounds and contumaciously differs 
from it in opinion. Scientism here abjures its boasted 
methods of observation and experiment, and belches 
forth nothing but slanders and hatreds. Spiritual- 
ism, however, goes quietly on, diminishing the force 
and power of the old ecclesiastical dogmas, and pre- 
senting a formidable barrier to the progress of mate- 
rialistic skepticism. We need not say that it was 
permitted by divine providence for these particular 
ends. Nor would that give it any special indorse- 
ment, for providence turns the basest and vilest 
things to some uses. There is no theory which will 
adequately explain its very complex phenomena, but 
that they are parts of a great organic movement 
which has followed the last judgment, irresistible as 
Niagara, by which the spiritual and the natural 
worlds are being brought into nearer and more con- 
scious relations to each other, for the final ultimation 
of the New Jerusalem or the spiritual kingdom of 
Christ. 

We must be careful, however, to divide the influ- 
ences from the spiritual world into two classes, be- 



292 THE END OF THE WORLD. 

cause that world is composed of two classes, the good 
and the evil. It would be well to have different 
words to express these different powers, spiritualism 
to represent the power of good spirits, and spiritism 
to represent the power of evil spirits, the former 
tending to ultimate the spirituality of heaven, and 
the latter the sensuality of hell upon the earth. 
Every human being is interiorly conjoined to spirits 
of both these classes, who, whilst undergoing their 
own judgment, endeavor to draw him away with 
them either to heaven or hell. 

Evil spirits desire in every way to interfere with 
and destroy the free agency of man. By that sign 
you may know them. They attempt to control men 
in every conceivable manner. They inspire their 
affections and thoughts and obsess their bodies when- 
ever they can. They allure, deceive, betray, and 
destroy by the subtlest devices. They greatly desire 
to teach and guide the world by plausible but false 
and dangerous doctrines. They infuse, whenever 
possible, their own utterly selfish life into their de- 
luded victims, separating married partners, alienat- 
ing friends and kindred, exciting to all forms and 
shades of cupidity, ambition, falsehood, and wicked- 
ness, sometimes even inducing insanity, idiocy, dis- 
ease, and death. 



THE JUDGMENT AND ITS EFFECTS. 293 

Good spirits are not quiescent or absent while the 
evil are pressing with such cunning and vigor upon 
the human race. They are busily engaged in antag- 
onizing the evil spheres, which they see and we do 
not. They are eager also to guide, protect, liberalize, 
and illuminate our souls in a thousand ways imper- 
ceptible to ourselves. We seldom hear from them, 
for their work is like the gentle dew, or the wind 
that bloweth, we know not how or why. They never 
wish to force our belief, or to control us in any man- 
ner. They respect our individual rights and our 
free agency above everything; and leave us wisely 
to the direction of the Lord and His Divine Word, 
and to the cultivation of those rational faculties 
which God has given us for the self-government of 
this life. But they are ever vigilant, ever active, 
and are integral elements in that great organizing 
power which is shaping a glorious destiny for the 
Church and the world. 

I would not, however, venture to make a dog- 
matic assertion, that because spiritism is a manifest 
evil power, spiritualism will be always a concealed 
good power. The worst part of spiritism is no 
doubt still concealed, and in the course of the future 
evolution and development of the Xew Church upon 

earth, spiritualism may display its now hidden power 

25* 



294 THE END OF THE WORLD. 

by wonderful and beneficent demonstrations. An 
opened Word means an opened heaven and the 
presence of angels. The difficulties and dangers 
which may lie in the way of the Church from at- 
tendant evil spirits, will all be surely overcome by 
a life according to the commandments and faith in 
the Divine Humanity. 

Behold then the great spiritual forces or causes 
now simultaneously at work everywhere since the 
last judgment. Scientism and rationalism, studying 
the natural evolution of morals and constructing a 
religion of humanity. The conservative powers of 
Church and State, with mammon, precedent, and 
fashion for allies, struggling desperately to save the 
machine and maintain the statu quo. The radical 
forces of evil, the devil's commune, organizing to 
plunder and destroy. A little Church, possessing 
the spiritual oracles of God and the light of the 
world, almost unknown among men, hidden away 
from the Pharaohs and Herods of the age, like 
Moses in the bulrushes or the child Jesus in Egypt. 
Lastly, two great streams of influx from heaven and 
hell, spiritualism and spiritism, passing through the 
world of spirits to the earth, and there associating 
themselves by secret affinities, one with all that is 
good, and the other with all that is evil, in the per- 



THE JUDGMENT AND ITS EFFECTS. 295 

sonal, social, and institutional activities of human 
life. 

A great conflict impends; a long, perhaps, but 
final crisis is at hand. We will find that the law 
of the spirit is identical with the law of nature, and 
that universal law is, the survival of the fittest. 



CHAPTEE XL 

CONFIRMATIONS FROM THE WORD. 

rjlHE great truths which have been expounded, 
-*" and innumerable correlated and confirming 
truths, are contained in the spiritual sense of the 
Word of God, the fountain of all light and truth. 
The subject is so important, that I must strengthen 
my position by explaining the spiritual meaning of 
some of the other terms, used in the literal sense in 
relation to the end of the world and the judgment 
day. I will also give several illustrations of the 
wonderful light which can be drawn from the most 
difficult passages by the application of the key of 
correspondences to the closed doors of scriptural 
truth. 

It has been clearly shown from the spiritual sense 
of the Word that the end of the world is the consum- 
mation of the age or closing of the apostolic dispen- 
sation of truth. It has been shown that the coming 
of Christ in the clouds of heaven is a revelation of 
divine truth from His Word, a descent of the spirit 
into the letter, which brings spirits and men into 
296 



CONFIRMATIONS FROM THE WORD. 297 

judgment; and that this judgment will go on until 
" a new heaven and a new earth" or a perfected state 
of human society, in both internal and external 
forms, shall be inaugurated in the world. It remains 
now to solve some further difficulties which might 
be propounded as to the judgment itself. 

The judgment day is not a day in time and space 
in which the judgment is to occur, but a concurrence 
of all the states of the spiritual life and thought of 
the Church which render a judgment necessary. 
Time is indicative of states of life. The unchange- 
ableness of the Divine Being is affirmed by saying 
that He is the same yesterday, to-day, and forever, 
and that with the Lord a thousand years are as one 
day, and one day as a thousand years. When the 
angel sware that time should be no longer, he meant 
that the states of the Church were finally attained 
and the Church consummated, or that " the mystery 
of God was finished." And the expression " till the 
times of the Gentiles be fulfilled," means until those 
outside of the visible Church have passed through 
all the spiritual states and experiences, which must 
precede that great organic change called the judg- 
ment. 

The spiritual states of life and thought in the 
Church and the world are contained in the books of 



298 THE END 0F THE world. 

God's knowledge which no man can open. These 
are the books mentioned in Revelation. They are 
known only to God, for they are infinite in extent 
and variety. Therefore it is said that no man know- 
eth the day or the hour of the judgment (the spirit- 
ual states calling for it), no, nor any angel ; nor even 
the Son of Man Himself, that is Christ in His 
human nature, but the Father only, that is Christ in 
His divine nature, the Almighty. 

The judgment day is the day of the Lord, when 
the states of the Church are explored by that influx 
of divine light which is called the coming of the 
Lord. It is called a great and terrible day, a day of 
clouds and darkness, a day of wrath and anger to 
show the effects upon the Church, when the revealing 
light of divine truth shall be cast upon its unfaith- 
fulness, its shortcomings, its hypocrisies, and its false 
doctrines. 

"So teach us to number our days that we may 
apply our hearts unto wisdom" or, as the original has 
it, cause our hearts to come to wisdom. Ps. xc. 12. 

This little verse illustrates the superior power of 
illumination which the spiritual sense possesses over 
the natural, even when the meaning appears to be 
transparent in the letter. The literal sense offers an 
idea something like this : let us see the vanity and 



CONFIRMATIONS FROM THE WORD. 299 

shortness of life so that we may improve the time 
and attend to our spiritual interests. Now for the 
spiritual sense. " To number our days" is to explore 
and analyze our spiritual states of thought and feel- 
ing, as if taking a census of them ; to examine our- 
selves with mathematical accuracy and severity. We 
cannot do this of ourselves, for nothing but divine 
truth can pass a true judgment. Therefore the ex- 
pression is " teach us to number our days." The 
object of this thorough self-examination is to cause 
our "hearts to come to wisdom/' that our affections 
may be brought into such union w T ith spiritual truth, 
that good and truth conjoined may govern our con- 
duct. Days therefore are states of the soul. 

The six days of creation represent the changing 
states of the regenerating soul until it reaches the 
seventh or sabbath state, which is one of rest from 
temptation and peace in the Lord. The six days 
also represent the labors and combats with the hells 
which Christ endured in His work of redemption, 
and the Sabbath day represents His state of union 
with the Father, in which the divine power was 
most clearly manifested through Him, which is the 
reason why so many of His miracles were performed 
on that day. 

The last day is no specified time but the final state 



300 THE END 0F THE WORLD. 

of the Church as to charity and faith, "the fulness 
of time," which necessitates that time or a series of 
changing states shall be with it no longer, but that 
it shall pass away and a new order of things shall 
take its place. When our Lord says that whosoever 
eateth His flesh and drinketh His blood, He will raise 
him " up at the last day," He does not mean at the 
end of the man's life or at the end of the world. Ac- 
cording to the literal theory everybody is raised up at 
the last day, whether or not they have eaten His flesh 
or drank His blood. Christ means that whoever 
partakes of His divine nature shall attain a final or 
perfect state of union with Him, through the power 
of His spiritual resurrection, which is not a natural 
resurrection, but a rising above the pow r er of that 
carnal nature, which is death, into the endless life 
of the divine love. The last day is therefore the 
man's final spiritual state. 

How is the judgment effected? Literal and sen- 
suous as the interpretation of the Word of God has 
been and still is, there are not many intelligent 
christians who have not quite outgrown or out- 
reasoned their childish faith in Paul's picture of the 
Lord, descending in the clouds with a great shout 
and a trumpet, and the saints rising out of their 
graves and joining the living in an ascent into the 



CONFIRMATIONS FROM THE WORD. 3Q1 

atmosphere to meet the Lord and live with Him for- 
ever. If the dear, good old apostle really meant all 
this literally, we know that he must have given what 
we call a sensuous interpretation to the mystical say- 
ings of the prophets, or to equally mystical visions 
of his own. He unquestionably mistook the man- 
ner as well as the time of the second advent. Re- 
member also, fellow-christian ! that Paul's words are 
not the Word of God, and that he would have been 
inexpressibly shocked, could he have seen that his 
earnest pastoral letters to the churches would have 
been ranked with Moses and the prophets, and with 
the ever-living words of the Master. 

It is truth which brings us into judgment. A 
man passes judgment and sentence upon himself 
every day by his acceptance or rejection of the truths, 
scientific, civil, moral, or spiritual, which are pre- 
sented to him. The Lord Jesus Christ is the truth 
itself, the Word made flesh, the Logos, the divine 
w T isdom. The divine love does not judge, for it loves 
and forgives infinitely. Therefore it is said, "the 
Father judgeth no man, but hath committed all 
judgment unto the Son/' And the Son distinctly 
disclaims any personal judgment of men, for He says, 
"If any man hear my words and believe not, I judge 

him notP 

26 



302 THE END OF THE WORLD. 

" He that rejecteth me and receiveih not my words, hath 
one that judgeth him, the Word that I have spoken, the 
same shall judge him in the last day" John xii. 48. 

Every general judgment at the end of a dispensa- 
tion, which destroys the old and initiates a new order 
of things, is therefore effected by a revelation or 
further unfolding of divine truth. The sound of a 
trumpet is always the sign in the symbolic language 
of scripture, that a new revelation from heaven is 
about to be made. When the law was given on 
Sinai, " there was the voice of a trumpet exceeding 
loud, so that all the people that was in the camp 
trembled exceedingly." The people were called to 
assemble themselves to hear the divine will by the 
sound of two silver trumpets. When John was 
about to receive that wonderful spiritual revelation 
from Christ Himself, he heard behind him " a great 
voice as of a trumpet." The trumpets sounded in 
the book of Revelation called attention to the divine 
truths that were about to be revealed. The last 
trump, the trumpet of the archangel, which will 
raise the dead and call to judgment, is the symbolic 
expression to show that at the end of the apostolic 
world or Church, a great and new revelation will be 
made from heaven. That revelation is found in the 



CONFIRMATIONS FROM THE WORD. 3Q3 

spiritual sense of the Word of God revealed through 
Swedenborg. 

The power of this revelation to satisfy all the de- 
mands of the rational faculty (Assyria), and all the 
just claims of science (Egypt), and to do away with 
all sensuous and literal interpretation and overcome 
the power of our carnal nature, represented by 
dragons and serpents, is wonderfully predicted in 
these verses of Isaiah : 

11 And it shall come to pass in that day that the great 
trumpet shall be blown, and they shall come which were 
ready to perish in the land of Assyria, and the outcasts 
in the land of Egypt, and shall worship the Lord in the 
holy mount at Jerusalem." xxvii. 13. 

" In that day the Lord with his sore and great and 
strong sword shall punish leviathan the piercing serpent, 
even leviathan that crooked serpent ; and he shall slay the 
dragon that is in the sea." xxvii. 1. 

The watchful care of the Lord in protecting this 
spiritual sense for the use of His Church is there 
represented under the following figure : 

" In that day sing ye unto her, A vineyard of red 
wine. 

u I, the Lord, do keep it: I water it every moment: 
lest any hurt it, I will keep it night and day." xxvii. 
2,3. 



304 THE END 0F THE world. 

Its influence in regenerating mankind is shown 
by its power of bringing spiritual things out of 
natural or literal things, or of converting Jacob into 
Israel. 

" He shall cause them that come out of Jacob to take 
root : Israel shall blossom and bud, and Jill the face of 
the world with fruit r xxvii. 6. 

Who are the dead who are awakened by the sound 
of the trumpet and brought into judgment? One 
of the darkest and saddest misinterpretations of the 
Word of God is the doctrine of a material resurrec- 
tion. It is not necessary to expose its fallacies and 
its evil influences in this place. As the physical 
universe, our globe included, is a necessary and per- 
petual basis of the spiritual world above it, the body 
we leave behind us is left behind forever. It is re- 
solved into its original elements, and it would not 
only be a useless but an impossible and retrograde 
step for the soul to return and resume it. Job ex- 
presses the genuine truth in the marginal rendering 
of a famous mistranslated passage, " After I shall 
awake, though this body be destroyed, yet out of my 
flesh shall I see God." The dead who are now being 
raised from their graves are thus alluded to in the 
sacred writings : 



CONFIRMATIONS FROM THE WORD. 305 

" You hath he quickened, who were dead in trespasses 
and sins. 11 Eph. ii. 1. 

" You being dead in your sins and in the uncircumcision 
of your flesh." Col. ii. 13. 

" All they that hate me, love death." Prov. viii. 36. 

"Her house is the way to hell, going down to the cham- 
bers of death." Prov. vii. 27. 

" To be carnally minded is death." Rom. viii. 6. 

" The hour is coming and now is, when the dead shall 
hear the voice of the Son of God, and they that hear shall 
live" John v. 25. 

" We know that we have passed from death unto life, 
because we love the brethren." John iii. 14. 

" The soul that sinneth, it shall die." Ezek. xviii. 4. 

" The letter killeth but the spirit giveth life." 2 Cor. 
iii. 6. 

Let us proceed to bring to life some more of the 
spiritual truths of the Word which have been killed 
by the letter. The destruction of the physical uni- 
verse is maintained and expected, because the Word 
declares in several places that at the judgment the 
sun shall be darkened, the moon shall cease to give 
her light, and the stars shall fall from heaven. The 
spiritual sense of sun, moon, and stars will deliver 
us from this sensuous fallacy, and throw beautiful 

and instructive light on many obscure passages of 
u 26* 



306 THE END 0F THE WORLD, 

the "Word of God. The illustrations must neces- 
sarily be brief and imperfect, but they will be clear 
and convincing. 

The first chapter of Genesis, containing ostensibly 
an account of the physical creation which the ration- 
alists and scientists reject, is a history in symbols of 
the building up or creation of the human soul from 
an original chaotic or formless condition. The 
heaven and earth alluded to are the internal and ex- 
ternal structures of the spirit. The first day or state 
of man under the creative broodings of the divine 
spirit is occupied by the creation of light and the 
separation between day and night. That light is the 
general light of the spiritual world flowing into all 
men and giving them a perception of right and 
wrong, and a knowledge of two different states, one 
of good and one of evil. That light exists before 
the sun, moon, and stars are created. The appear- 
ance of the latter, which was on the third day, indi- 
cates that the soul had become capable of a far higher 
state, that of receiving the life of charity and faith 
and the knowledge of innumerable spiritual things 
from the divine source of all light. 

The sun represents the Lord, the sun of righteous- 
ness, the source of all heat and light, or love and 
wisdom. Our daytime is a state of conjoined charity 



CONFIRMATIONS FROM THE WORD. 3Q7 

and faith which are spiritual heat and light derived 
from Him. Therefore it is said of heaven, that 
there shall be no night there. Night is a state of 
spiritual darkness in which the sun, or the divine 
love and the divine wisdom conjoined, 'cannot be 
seen, but which is illuminated by the reflected rays 
of the divine wisdom (the moon) which come from 
the literal sense of the Word, the Church, and the 
wonderful works of nature, as far as we can be made 
to understand them. The sun and moon therefore 
represent the Lord in us, or our own spiritual states 
in relation to the Lord, our states of charity and 
faith, our states of love to God and the neighbor. 
See how clearly this meaning is borne out by the 
words of the Scriptures. 

" Thy sun shall no more go down : neither shall thy 
moon withdraw itself : for the Lord shall be thine ever- 
lasting light" Isa. lx. 20. 

" Moreover the light of the moon shall be a$ the light of 
the sun, and the light of the sun shall be sevenfold, as the 
light of seven days, in the day that the Lord bindeth up 
the breach of his people, and healeth the stroke of their 
wound.' 1 Isa. xxx. 26. 

The highest degree of the divine light in the soul 
is when God has taken such absolute possession of 



308 THE END 0F THE world. 

our spiritual nature, that no external representation 
of it is necessary. Our life is then " hid with Christ 
in God." 

"And the city had no need of the sun, neither of the 
moon to shine in it, for the glory of God did lighten it, 
and the Lamb is the light thereof' 1 Rev. xxi. 23. 

What is the meaning of the sun and moon stand- 
ing still for the space of a whole day while Joshua 
avenged himself of his enemies? This was not de- 
signed to be stated as a literal fact, but as a quota- 
tion from the symbolical book of Jasher, a part of 
the ancient Word which was lost. It meant that 
God is present with His children, as a sun and moon, 
giving them divine light to contend with their spirit- 
ual enemies, and remaining with them through all 
the day or state of temptation, until they triumph — a 
triumph represented in literal history by Joshua's 
obstinate battle and great victory over the Amorites. 

The woman whom John saw in heaven clothed 
with the sun, with the moon under her feet, and the 
crown of twelve stars upon her head, represents the 
heavenly affections of the coming Church — the New 
Jerusalem — which shall be clad in the burning man- 
tle of God's love and charity, based and founded 
upon all the literal or reflected truths of the Word, 



CONFIRMATIONS FROM THE WORD. 3Q9 

and crowned or made regal by the possession of all 
the genuine truths of the spiritual sense. It depends 
on our own spiritual states, our relations to God, 
whether our sun is bright or dark, whether our moon 
shines or does not shine, whether we are clothed with 
the sun of righteousness, or with that sun which has 
become " black as sack-cloth of hair f whether we 
stand upon the perfect, full-orbed moon, represent- 
ing the reflected wisdom of God, or upon that moon 
which like the waters of Egypt has been turned 
into blood, representing the falsification of divine 
truth. 

The stars, being myriads of lights away off in the 
heavens, represent the innumerable truths which are 
set in orderly array in the spiritual sense of the 
Word of God. They all proceed from the infinite 
divine truth, therefore the Lord Jesus Christ, when 
symbolically presented to John, had seven stars in 
His right hand ; and it is said the seven stars were 
the angels of the seven churches, to represent that all 
spiritual light in the church in heaven, as well as in 
the church upon earth, is received from the hand of 
the Divine Man, who is the alpha and omega, the 
beginning and the end, the Almighty. 

A star is said to fall from heaven to the earth 
when a spiritual truth imparted to the church 



310 THE END OF THE WORLD. 

receives a sensuous or literal interpretation. Some 
spiritual truths when thus materialized, as it were, 
are so corrupted and perverted as to be exceedingly 
injurious in their effects upon life and conduct. 
Such are signified by the following symbols in the 
Apocalypse : 

" And the third angel sounded, and there fell a great 
star from heaven, burning as it were a lamp, and it fell 
upon the third part of the rivers and upon the fountains 
of waters : 

" And the name of the star is called Wormwood, and 
the third part of the waters became wormwood: and 
'many men died of the waters, because they were made 
bitter^ Rev. viii. 10, 11. 

I will name some of these great stars which have 
fallen to the earth, and made the waters of truth 
bitter and destroyed the foundations of the Church 
in man. 

The truth that the Lord Jesus Christ is the 
Father, Son, and Holy Ghost in one divine person 
is a star in heaven. The doctrine that God is a 
Being in three co-equal and co-substantial divine 
persons, and that Jesus Christ is one of those persons, 
is the same star fallen from heaven. 

The truth that the Lord took on our carnal 



CONFIRMATIONS FROM THE WORD. 3H 

human nature and crucified its lusts and affections, 
striving against sin, so as to become a perfectly Di- 
vine Man, having power over all flesh and therefore 
able to redeem us, is a star in heaven. The doctrine 
that Christ laid down His physical life for us, and 
saves us by dying in our stead, is the same star fallen 
from heaven. 

The truth that we are saved by appropriating the 
goodness and truth of the Lord, His flesh and blood, 
into our lives so that we become like Him, is a star 
in heaven. The doctrine that if wt believe in the 
blood of Christ shed on the cross, we have the right- 
eousness of Christ imputed to us, is the same star 
fallen from heaven. 

The truth that the power of Christ's glorification 
of His human nature will draw us up from that car- 
nal life, which is death, into His own endless divine 
life, is a star in heaven. The doctrine that the power 
of Christ's physical resurrection will resuscitate all 
the dead bodies in the graves is the same star fallen 
from heaven. 

The truth that the Lord's Church is founded upon 
the rock of His Divine Humanity and is the king- 
dom of heaven within us, is a star in heaven. The 
doctrine that the real Church of God is any divinely 
appointed external institution, founded upon any 



312 TBE END OF THE WORLD. 

ancient or modern Peter, is the same star fallen from 
heaven. 

The truth that we are commanded to extirpate 
every trace of the evil and the false from our spir- 
itual natures is a star in heaven. The literal state- 
ment that God commanded the Israelites to destroy 
every soul in the land of Canaan, is the same star 
fallen from heaven through the sensuous mind of 
the Jewish Church. 

The truth that in the last days there shall be a 
perfect Church with a perfect and redeemed form 
of society is a star in heaven. The idea that the 
Jews shall be restored to Judea and rebuild Jerusalem 
is the same star fallen from heaven. 

The truth that the apostolic dispensation is ended 
and that Christ has come to judgment in the spiritual 
sense of His Word is a star in heaven. The doctrine 
that Christ will establish a tribunal in the clouds 
and destroy the material globe is the same star fallen 
from heaven. 

These illustrations, with all those in the preceding 
chapters, are surely sufficient to explain, from the 
spiritual stand-point, every phenomenon recorded in 
the Word in relation to the second advent of Christ 
and the end of the world. One thing more is per- 
haps necessary to the comprehension of the subject. 



CONFIRMATIONS FROM THE WORD. 31 3 

Spiritual truths are independent of times and spaces. 
The sun and moon have been always more or less 
dark according to the changing spiritual states of 
the Church. The decrees of catholic councils and 
the catechisms of protestant churches show that 
many stars have fallen from heaven in past ages. 
When it is said that the sun and moon shall be 
darkened and the stars shall fall from heaven when 
the great day of the Lord shall come, it is meant 
that when the light of divine truth shall penetrate 
the dark places of the Church, it will reveal the fact 
that its faith has been already eclipsed, its charity 
or brotherly love has been already lessened, and the 
spiritual truths of heaven have been already cor- 
rupted and falsified by the spirit of literal interpre- 
tation. 

The bar of God, the great white throne, the judge 
upon it, the soul trembling before it ; the recording 
books produced, the books compared, the counsel 
pleading, the life laid bare, the evidence weighed, 
the verdict given, the sentence passed and executed, 
justice vindicated, etc., are all sensuous images 
created by the human mind itself, when contem- 
plating the heavenly truths on this subject in an 
earthly manner. No such scenes are ever objectively 

realized here or hereafter. The wicked man who 

o 27 



314 THE END OF THE WORLD. 

rises out of his dead body an evil spirit, passes 
rapidly and voluntarily into judgment and sentence, 
by rejecting with disgust and abhorrence all the 
heavenly truths presented to him, by avoiding and 
repelling all the good, pure, and chaste associations 
offered, and by seeking a low, base, and sensuous 
level corresponding to the falsehood and vileness of 
his own life. Every man makes and chooses his 
own heaven and his own hell, and the operations of 
divine truth silently but unerringly lead him with 
his own consent to his own place. 

The book of Revelation is the great book of judg- 
ment, for it reveals the spiritual states of the Church 
and the world as seen by the light of divine truth. 
The idea that the judgment is only described in the 
twentieth chapter, beginning at the eleventh verse, 
" And I saw a great white throne," etc., is erroneous. 
The whole book is a magnificent series of judgments 
upon all the evils and falsities in the Church and 
the world, and in which, wonderful to relate, every 
human being may read his own character and analyze 
his own spiritual condition. 

The book begins with the judgment passed by 
Christ upon the seven churches, which mean all 
good people everywhere who are in salvable condi- 
tions, notwithstanding faults and infirmities which 



CONFIRMATIONS FROM THE WORD. 3J5 

must be eradicated. The sixth chapter contains a 
terrible judgment consequent upon the falsifications 
of the Word of God described in the vision of the 
four horses. The opening of the vials and the 
sounding of the trumpets are followed by judgments 
upon various forms of mixed good and evil, found 
in different phases of the Church and of individual 
experience. The judgments passed upon the beast, 
the false prophet, the great city of Babylon, the 
great red dragon, Gog and Magog, and that old ser- 
pent the Devil, are all descriptive of the spiritual 
processes by which the evil and the false are sepa- 
rated from the good and true in the Church and in 
the individual soul. 

The final and closing act of the judgment is the 
judgment of the dead, the mere residue, those who 
have little or no spiritual vitality. Judgment thus 
begins in the highest point, in the seven churches, 
and descends through all intermediate grades, to the 
very lowest, the dead, who are divided into three 
classes, those who come from the sea, those who come 
from death, and those who come from hell. The 
spiritually dead delivered up by the sea are those 
who are entirely immersed in the life of the senses 
and take no thought or care for spiritual things. 
Those who are delivered up by death are those who 



316 THE END OF THE WORLD. 

are really dead to all righteous aspirations. Those 
who are delivered up by hell constitute the last and 
lowest degree, those who are thoroughly confirmed 
in the life of the evil and the false. 

The great white throne indicates the power and 
purity of the divine justice. The heaven and earth 
flying before His face so that there was no place 
found for them, represents the passing away of all 
the religious, social, and institutional life of man as 
inspired by the teachings of the apostolic Church 
and of all Churches which preceded it. They were 
all weighed in the balance and found wanting. The 
divine truth judges in mercy. It descends to the 
last and lowest, not to condemn those who had 
already condemned themselves, but to deliver from 
their association and their fate, any who might have 
the least spark of the spiritual life still lingering 
about them. 

Therefore the books are opened, the book of the 
^memory and all the spiritual experiences of each 
individual soul. The other book, the book of life, 
the Word of God, is opened also. The book of the 
spiritual states of the man is compared with the 
book of the spiritual states of his Maker, so far as 
they can be revealed to man or angel. If his name 
was found written in the book of life, that is, if 



CONFIRMATIONS FROM THE WORD. 317 

there was anything in the man's life or character, 
which is his name, which corresponded or was re- 
sponsive to something in the Divine Life, as if it 
was derived from it, or akin to it, or could be 
brought into harmony with it, that man was saved. 
Xot saved by an instantaneous purification and ele- 
vation into heaven, which is always and totally im- 
possible, for God works always by laws of life, but 
by being delivered over to the explorations and in- 
structions, and long and severe disciplines of the 
world of spirits, that prison from which no man 
emerges until he has paid the uttermost farthing. 

Death and hell were cast into the lake of fire : 
that is, the incorrigibly wicked and evil were left 
to the consuming power of their own terrible lusts 
and uncontrolled passions, which constitute that fire 
which can never be quenched, and the fate of the 
lost. It is fair to presume from the context that 
many of the dead who were delivered up by the sea 
were not cast into the lake of fire, or that many 
people who never heard of God or the Church or 
the spiritual life, or who have apparently neglected 
them all, may still be found, after such a thorough 
exploration as only the divine truth can make, to 
have some little spark of life, some little grain of 

mustard-seed in them, which may, under fostering 

27* 



318 THE END OF THE WORLD. 

influences, expand into some little likeness of that 
kingdom of heaven, which is created, grows, lives, 
and rules within us. 

That when the Lord comes to judgment in the 
world of spirits and thereby afterwards upon earth, 
His coming will be preceded by a great revelation of 
His divine truth is also taught in the Apocalypse in 
this language : 

" And I saw another angel fly in the midst of heaven, 
having the everlasting gospel to preach unto them that 
dwell on the earth, and to every nation and kindred and 
tongue and people, 

" Saying with a loud voice, fear God and give glory to 
Him, for the hour of his judgment is come." Rev. xiv. 
6,7. " 

" And I looked, and behold, a white cloud, and upon 
the cloud one sat like the Son of Man, having on his head 
a golden crown and in his hand a sharp sickle." v. 14. 

This spiritual gospel, which is the revelation of 
the internal sense of the Word, is also predicted in 
the prophet Joel (chapter second) under the figure of 
a great and strong people in battle array, whose 
coming causes the earth to quake, the heavens to 
tremble, the sun and moon to grow dark, and the 
stars to withdraw their light. These things indicate 



CONFIRMATIONS FROM THE WORD. 319 

judgment by divine truths. The chapter opens with 
the symbol of approaching revelation, the sound of 
the trumpet, and it is declared that the day of the 
Lord is at hand. To the Church which is about to 
perish, it is called " a day of darkness and of gloom- 
iness, a day of clouds and thick darkness/' because 
it reveals the dark and gloomy spiritual state of the 
faith which is passing away. To the Church which 
is about to come, this day is " as the morning spread 
upon the mountains," a new fresh light shining into 
the highest places of the soul, and revealing the won- 
ders of the spiritual sense under the symbol of " a 
great people and a strong : there hath not been ever 
the like, neither shall be any more after it." 

The stars, in their infinite number, order, and 
beauty, maintained in their courses by the divine 
hand, represent the associated and coherent truths 
of the spiritual sense illuminating the darkness of 
the human mind. Here the same truths are repre- 
sented in a different manner, as a vast, organic, sys- 
tematized power moving upon the strongholds of 
error, and exploring the secret thoughts and intents 
of the heart in an old and corrupt system, thus 
bringing it into judgment. This power is the 
"strong people set in battle array." They have 
u the appearance of horses and horsemen and the 



320 THE END 0F THE WORLD. 

noise of chariots on the tops of the mountains," be- 
cause they are truths addressing the spiritual under- 
standing of men. " They shall march every one 
on his ways, and they shall not break their ranks: 
neither shall one thrust another : they shall walk 
every one in his path," indicates the sublime order 
and coherence which prevail among all the minutest, 
associated elements of this grand system of truth. 
That they shall fall upon the sword and not be 
wounded, means that they can never possibly be in- 
jured or worsted by any false doctrines which may 
attack them. 

These people move " like the noise of a flame of 
fire that devoureth the stubble" because spiritual 
truths bring the affections into judgment, revealing 
all the emotions and passions of the heart. How 
clearly did the heavenly words of Jesus bring out 
the hatreds, cunning, treachery, and murderous spirit 
of the scribes and pharisees. We may be quite sure 
that the approach of spiritual truth will do the same 
thing in the present age. It will unveil all false 
pretensions, expose all hypocrisies. What seems " the 
Garden of Eden" before it, will be " a desolate wil- 
derness" behind it. Nothing will escape its terrible 
revealings. It will be instinctively feared and hated 
or ridiculed and rejected by those who are pained by 



CONFIRMATIONS FROM THE WORD. 321 

its great light. Therefore it is said, " Before their 
face the people shall be much pained : all faces shall 
gather blackness." The Jews experienced all this 
when the light of Christ and His apostles burst 
upon them. The christian world will repeat the ex- 
perience when the sword of the spiritual sense, re- 
vealed by Swedenborg, shall pierce "even to the 
dividing asunder of soul and spirit." 

The terrible assaults and explorations of this great 
army of spiritual truths upon the fenced cities of 
the old corrupt faith are admirably described in the 
following language : 

" They shall run like mighty men : they shall climb the 
wall like men of war, . . . 

" They shall run to and fro in the city : they shall run 
upon the wall, they shall climb up upon the houses ; they 
shall enter in at the windows like a thief 

u The earth shall quake before them : the heavens shall 
tremble : the sun and the moon shall be dark, and the 
stars shall withdraw their shining : 

" And the Lord shall utter his voice before his army : 
for his camp is very great : for he is strong that executeth 
his word ; for the day of the Lord is great and very ter- 
rible, and who can abide it?" Joel ii. 7-11. 

In this same chapter also is prophesied that re- 
markable development of spiritualism in the shape 



322 THE END 0F THE WORLD. 

of dreams, visions, and the opening of the spiritual 
senses under the Spirit of the Lord, which occurred 
abundantly in the primitive Church of Christ, and 
which has occurred and will still occur as one of the 
signs and consequences of the Second Advent of our 
Lord and Saviour : 

" And it shall come to pass afterward, that I will pour 
out my spirit upon all flesh : and your sons and your 
daughters shall prophesy; your old men shall dream 
dreams, your young men shall see visions : 

" And also upon the servants and upon the handmaids 
in those days will I pour out my spirit" vs. 28, 29. 

In the twenty-fifth chapter of Isaiah is another 
remarkable prophecy of the revelation of the spir- 
itual sense of the Word of God. It begins with the 
exultation and praise of the " remnant" or righteous, 
w 7 ho recognize the wonderful things which God has 
done, and believe His faithful and true " counsels of 
old" which are the truths of the spiritual sense. 
The cause of their joy and praise is said to be the 
destruction of a certain city : 

" For thou hast made of a city an heap : of a de- 
fenced city a ruin : a palace of strangers to be no city : 
it shall never be built" 

This city which is to be so overturned and never 



CONFIRMATIONS FROM THE WORD. 323 

rebuilt is the whole doctrinal system of the apostolic 
Church. It is the same city which was climbed into 
and overrun and destroyed by the great army in the 
prophecy of Joel. It is called " a palace of stran- 
gers/' because it became ruled over by strange and 
false doctrines, the idols of the present christian 
Churcli, and was no longer the city of the great 
King. 

" Therefore shall the strong people glorify thee : the 
city of the terrible nations shall fear thee. 11 

The " strong people," like the " great people and 
a strong" of Joel, are the spiritual truths of the 
Word which glorify the Lord by revealing His true 
nature and mission. Therefore also "the city of the 
terrible nations/' or the doctrinal systems of scient- 
ism, rationalism, and atheism, are afraid, at the cer- 
tainty of meeting a new spiritual power which shall 
counteract all their influences. 

" For thou hast been a strength to the poor, a strength 
to the needy in his distress, a refuge from the storm, a 
shadow from the heat, when the blast of the terrible ones 
is as a storm against the wall. 11 

The truths of the spiritual sense unite us with the 
Lord and the angels, and thereby protect us against 
all the assaults and infestations of evil spirits and 



324 THE END 0F TEE WORLD. 

of wicked and unbelieving men. They are our hope 
and defence against the false prophets and false 
Christs, against the terrible beast with the teeth of 
iron, against death and the hell which follows him, 
against " the man of perdition" so fully revealed in 
these latter days. Therefore "the noise of the 
strangers," the dogmatic and enthusiastic assevera- 
tions of the old Church which is really a stranger 
to divine truth, and "the branch of the terrible 
ones," the young growing philosophy of scientism 
and rationalism antagonistic to Christ, are equally 
confounded and brought low by the influx of spir- 
itual light. 

" And in this mountain shall the Lord of Hosts make 
unto all people a feast of fat things, a feast of wines on 
the lees : of fat things full of marrow, of wines on the 
lees well refined." 

The mountain of the Lord is the high and holy 
state of life, faith and charity which is produced 
by receiving and obeying the spiritual truths of the 
Word. We then feast with the Lord, who gives us 
fat things, fat things full of marrow and wines well 
refined ; which are overflowing states of goodness or 
holiness of life and genuine wisdom of thought. 
This fat and this wine are the same spiritual good 



CONFIRMATIONS FROM THE WORD. 325 

and true things which were indicated by "the oil and 
the wine" which the Lord so carefully preserves from 
destruction among all the falsifications of the letter 
of His Word. What follows the reception and ap- 
propriation of these spiritual gifts ? 

" And he will destroy in this mountain the face of the 
covering cast over all people, and the veil that is spread 
over all nations. 11 

In this new and heavenly state of life and doc- 
trine, men will no longer be deceived by sensuous 
appearances, by the seeming truths of the letter, by 
that veil which was upon the minds of the people 
when Moses was read in the temple, by that veil 
which rests at present over the whole christian world, 
and which must be destroyed before any genuine 
spiritual truth can be received from heaven. 

That the destruction of the city, the coming of the 
Lord as a defence and a refuge, the mountain of the 
Lord, the feast of fat things and wine, and the re- 
moval of the veil of the letter, indicate and involve 
the judgment, the second advent, the opening of the 
spiritual sense, the new heaven and the new earth, 
the New Jerusalem, is plain from the verse which 
immediately follows : 

" He will swallow up death in victory : and the Lord 

28 



326 THE E]SlD 0F THE WORLD. 

God shall wipe away tears from all faces : and the rebuke 
of his people shall he take away from off all the earth ; 
for the Lord hath spoken it." 

Such was a very ancient prophecy of the revela- 
tion of the spiritual sense of the Word of God and 
its wonderful effect upon the world. Let us now 
survey a prophecy of the fate of the religious faith 
of the Church instituted by Christ, which was en- 
tirely concealed under the veils of the letter until 
the present times. 

Peter represents the faith of the Church, the rock 
of truth upon which the Church was founded. John 
represents the love or charity of the Church. There- 
fore he leaned upon the Lord's bosom, and received 
his life into the heart rather than into the under- 
standing. Peter and John are walking with our 
Lord by the Sea of Tiberias. 

Our Lord said, " Simon, son of Jonas, lovest thou 
me?" Simon means, in the Hebrew tongue, obedi- 
ence or hearkening, Jonas means a dove. Simon, 
son of Jonas, means that obedient faith which is 
born of love and innocence. This is the true faith, 
the faith that saves. It springs from love to the Lord 
Jesus Christ. Therefore our Lord reiterates the 
question " Lovest thou me ?" There is no proof of 
faith but love, and if one loves God, he loves the 



CONFIRMATIONS FROM THE WORD. 327 

neighbor also. Hence the solemn charge given to 
the Church, " Feed my lanibs," " Feed my sheep." 

Peter's earnest and even reproachful asseveration 
that his faith is the offspring of genuine love to the 
Lord, and therefore a true faith, is followed by a 
prediction of decline and death, the relevance of 
which can only be seen in the spiritual sense. When 
the Church was young or fresh from the hands of 
Christ, it girded itself and went wheresoever it 
would. The faith of the Church was then free and 
spontaneous, for the truth makes free, and the ser- 
vice of the Lord is perfect liberty. But when self- 
love gained the ascendency and selfish interests ruled 
in the Church, the former faith grew feeble and old, 
was bound and tyrannized over by the fallacies of 
the understanding and ecclesiastical authority, until 
it became a mere blind faith and finally a dead faith 
without works. 

Peter the apostle was crucified like his master 
and so glorified God, but Peter, the representative 
of the faith of the apostolic Church, has suffered a 
long and painful and imprisoned old age, and when 
he dies he glorifies God only in the sense that the 
passing away forever of all these false and unfruitful 
things, makes room for the manifestation of new 
life and glory from the heavens. "Wherefore our 



328 THE END 0F THE WORLD. 

Lord says to the Church " Follow me." Turn away 
from the decrees of councils, the formulas of cate- 
chisms, the traditions of men, and follow the Christ 
and the Christ only. 

Peter turns away from Christ, thus losing the 
truth, and looks at John who was spontaneously fol- 
lowing the Lord without being commanded to do 
so, as genuine love always does; and with that super- 
cilious superiority which a false faith assumes over 
charity or genuine goodness of life, exclaims " And 
what shall this man do?" If I, who teach the 
Church, am to come to such an ignominious end, 
what office can this mere silent charity fulfil ? It 
shall live till I come, says the Lord ; it shall never 
die ; it is the oil and the wine I preserve in all ages 
and all religions. But what is that to thee? the 
lower cannot judge the higher. Follow thou me, 
for in me alone is the light of the world. 

Peter is dead or dying : the visions of the four 
beasts and the four horses have been fulfilled and 
realized in the history of the Church and the world ; 
false Christs and false prophets have done their evil 
work; the abomination of desolation occupies the 
holy place; the sun and the moon are darkened, 
the stars have fallen from heaven ; the trumpet has 
sounded ; Christ has appeared in the literal sense of 



CONFIRMATIONS FROM THE WORD. 329 

His Word, shining through it with all the power and 
glory of spiritual truth ; the ends of the world are 
upon us; the judgment has been executed in the 
world of spirits, and is now being executed in this ; 
the dead are rising and still to rise; the new morn- 
ing is spread upon the mountains; the spiritual 
world is opening; the new heaven and the new 
earth are being prepared ; the four winds of heaven 
are still striving upon the great sea ; and the chris- 
tian heart asks itself, What next ? 



28* 



CHAPTER XII. 

WHAT NEXT AND LAST? 

O WEDENBORG was no prophet, nor could the 
angels who were his frequent companions and 
instructors tell him anything important about the 
future of the Church and the world. The future is 
known only to God. Angels, spirits, and men reason 
from the known to the unknown, from cause to 
effect; and so complex are the questions, and the 
contingencies so innumerable, that their best prog- 
nostications are but reasonable conjectures. Our 
prophetic foresight has a very short radius. Swe- 
denborg saw clearly however the extraordinary free- 
dom of opinion and spirit of inquiry which would 
be asserted and manifested in the Church, on ac- 
count of the removal of the old pressure which 
weighed upon it from the world of spirits. He also 
expressed the belief, from his spiritual insight into 
the heart of the Christendom of the last century, 
that it would be exceedingly difficult for such people 

to receive, understand, or live out the heavenly prin- 
330 



WHAT NEXT AND LAST 7 %%\ 

ciples he was commissioned to teach. The angels 
had hope however of some far distant nation, as the 
first great centre of the New Church life. 

Some suppose that this nation is an undiscovered 
people in the interior of Africa, to whom Sweden- 
borg asserts spiritual communications from the Lord 
were being made in his lifetime. Swedenborg was 
the first of men who recognized the enormous but 
latent spiritual capabilities of the African race. 
Others think that the Hindoos and the Asiatics 
generally will receive the doctrines of the spiritual 
sense more readily, because they have so many frag- 
ments and debris of the ancient science of corre- 
spondences in their theology, philosophy, and liter- 
ature. Others again, and more plausibly, have sug- 
gested that the United States, then a mere congeries 
of sparsely inhabited colonies, and very remote from 
the thought and life of Europe, was the nation in- 
dicated. Certainly the doctrines have spread here 
more rapidly than elsewhere, and this country, on 
account of its great liberty of speech, thought, and 
action, is the best field for the speedy solution of all 
the world's social and religious problems. 

More than a hundred years have passed away 
since Swedenborg and the angels gave their modest 
opinions based upon the facts they had in their pos- 



332 THE END OF THE WORLD. 

session. Great changes have occurred within and 
without since that time. The spiritual and the natural 
worlds are coming nearer together, that is, the spirit- 
ual is so interpenetrating the natural, that not only 
stupendous events from spiritual causes have already- 
happened, but events still more stupendous are ma- 
turing for ultimation. By influxes and radiations 
from the New Church in the world of spirits, and 
from the opened spiritual sense of the Word of God, 
a vast new spiritual atmosphere has been created, the 
lightning that shines from east to west, in which the 
Lord is constantly descending with new light, new 
truth, new applications and new interpretations into 
the hearts of His children. Under the influence of 
fuller light from Swedenborg, from the spiritual 
world and from the opening Word we can now, by 
the exercise of the rational faculties, forecast the im- 
pending drama of the world with new and larger 
data, and with better prospects of successful conjec- 
ture. 

We may be sure that the causes now at work will 
thoroughly work out their ends. In other words, 
the laws of evolution will bring to light everything 
which is involved. They will go on to lay that 
physical and material foundation for the new heaven 
and the new earth which shall endure forever. Arts, 



WHAT NEXT AND LAST? 333 

sciences, manufactures, commerce will continue to ex- 
pand and spread their beneficent influences over the 
whole earth. Man's control over nature will grow 
to such an extent that he will almost annihilate the 
obstacles of time and space. He will multiply and 
distribute all the necessaries and comforts of life as 
never was done before. He will bring nations and 
individuals nearer together by rapid transits, instan- 
taneous communication of thought, and methods 
which will make the dream of clairvoyance a re- 
ality. All this is the lowest but most important 
field of preparation for that crowning result of 
brotherhood called the solidarity of the race. 

In the next higher field of sociology and history, 
the great principles of liberty, equality, and frater- 
nity will struggle for realization. Commotions and 
revolutions innumerable may be expected in the 
coming years; all sorts of changes in social and 
governmental forms ; destructions and reconstruc- 
tions. The opposite spirits of liberty and license 
will contend for supremacy. The organized selfish- 
ness of the world under its two great forms, capital 
and labor, will carry on an internecine war. Social 
and civil convulsions, beginning in Europe and ex- 
tending over the whole world, will make the literal- 
ist believe that the last great battle of Armageddon 



334 THE END OF THE WORLD. 

is in progress. It will be only the chaos which is 
necessary and preparatory to the new order. 

The visible New Church, possessing the spiritual 
oracles of God, will expand in numbers and power 
at a healthy and continually accelerating pace, in- 
creasing in spiritual gifts and spiritual insight as it 
advances. Swedenborg says it will grow upon earth 
in proportion as it grows from new-comers in the 
world of spirits, from whence its greatest power flows 
to men. It is therefore a double Church, having a 
spiritual and a natural life connected by correspond- 
ences. To propagate its doctrines successfully, the 
visible Church has necessarily cast itself in the 
moulds and forms of the dead dispensation, thus 
putting its new wine into old bottles. This has no 
doubt retarded or suppressed the true manifestation 
of the divine life in its members. This condition 
of things, however, is temporary, for the new wine 
will inevitably burst the bottles, which are only 
the wrappages of the Church in its chrysalis state, 
while it is being prepared for its free and heavenly 
life, when the external conditions necessary for it 
have been matured. What social and institutional 
forms it may then take, it is useless for us to conjec- 
ture. 

The growth and influence of the visible New 



WHAT NEXT AND LAST? 335 

Church cannot be measured by the progress of its 
technical institutions. Thousands of the receivers 
of the heavenly doctrines are unconnected with these 
institutions, and tens of thousands of church mem- 
bers in all denominations, including many of the 
clergy, have been more or less favorably impressed 
with the doctrines of Swedenborg. Two volumes of 
his works were offered gratuitously several years ago 
to ministers and students of theology, and more than 
forty thousand applications reveal the extent of the 
spirit of inquiry which exists in quarters where it 
was least expected. The living germs have been 
planted which are capable of indefinite, we might 
say infinite, expansion. This Church, still concealed 
as it were in the wilderness, has brought forth that 
man-child which shall eventually rule all nations 
with a rod of iron. 

Swedenborg says that a new church is always es- 
tablished among Gentiles, or built up outside of the 
old church, which refuses to receive the new light, 
and slowly decays and perishes in its errors and its 
obstinacy. It is not necessary to suppose that the 
New Church must first flourish among Africans and 
Asiatics. Swedenborg speaks of the christian gen- 
tilism of the catholic Church. A vast world of 
modern gentiles has been gradually growing up 



336 THE END 0F THE world. 

within the bounds of Christendom in the last three 
or four hundred years, — heretics and unbelievers, — 
people who have repudiated the doctrines and life of 
the old church. These modern gentiles who are in 
mere rational and scientific light and in states of 
natural goodness, are far more receptive of the genuine 
light of heaven than orthodox christians whose minds 
are enveloped in thick clouds of doctrinal error. 

The gentiles among whom the apostolic Church 
was reared were the corresponding elements of that 
age, the dissatisfied classes, the scientists, the ration- 
alists, the atheists of Judea, Greece, Rome, and other 
countries, and the common people who had outlived 
or outgrown the corrupt religions of the time, 
who were intuitively longing for something higher 
and better, and who were open to conviction because 
already emptied of their old false opinions. 

The New Church in Christendom will be built up 
from "the remnant" of good people in the old 
church and from those gentile classes outside of the 
pale of the Church. It is not probable that the 
African or the Asiatic will ever be led into the New 
Church by external missionary instructions. They 
will be brought into it by an interior way, the open- 
ing of spiritual perceptions, which is no doubt even 
now going on. It is very likely that they will un- 



WHAT NEXT AND LAST? 337 

dergo spiritual regeneration and be prepared for the 
new heavens and the new earth more easily than the 
nations of Europe and America. 

The old Churches will no doubt continue to linger 
in their present forms for a long time. Their mate- 
rial interests are too enormous for any speedy dis- 
solution. There will of course be many defections, 
but they will not yield to the pressure of the new 
age on account of attacks from without. The Lord's 
New Church in the world of spirits is secretly 
working with them, unconsciously to themselves. 
They will be slowly modified by influences operating 
from within, seen already in the greater liberty of 
thought and action and the growth of a more 
genuine spirit of charity. They will outgrow and 
outlive their false doctrines without any special and 
formal renunciations. There will be however recon- 
siderations, readjustments, reconstructions, and de- 
structive transformations. They will be gradually 
Swedenborgianized without accepting Swedenborg. 
In the fulness of time the old shells will be broken, 
and the living birds come forth, having been formed 
and vitalized by the spiritual influences of that New 
Jerusalem which descends from God out of heaven 
and which will make all things one in Jesus Christ. 

The clergy are now and will continue to be the great 
p w 29 



338 THE END OF THE WORLD. 

obstructionists. The pews will revolutionize the 
pulpit, not the pulpit the pews. 

There is no likelihood that there will be any more 
religious wars, not even between catholics and prot- 
estants in the United States. The base, selfish, and 
hypocritical elements, exceedingly numerous and 
powerful, may agitate for evil upon the surfaces 
and circumferences of church-life, but the Lord 
will keep the centres in states of peace and brother- 
hood with all mankind. It is far more probable 
that all people professing any religion, having any 
faith in God and a spiritual life, will combine in 
battle array against the terrible naturalism of the 
age, that vast monster compounded of scientism, 
rationalism, atheism, communism, nihilism, spirit- 
ism, and all other evil forces — represented by John 
as the rider upon the pale horse, by Daniel as the 
great beast with the teeth of iron, and by Paul as 
"the son of perdition." 

This power, composed of so many different and 
discordant elements, as all the powers of hell are, 
will concentrate and organize for the denial of God 
and the life of heaven, the rejection of the Word, 
the dethronement of Christ, the overthrow of all 
Churches, the destruction of governments, the abo- 
lition of marriage, and the reorganization of society 



WHAT NEXT AND LAST? 339 

upon avowed principles of selfishness, infidelity, and 
sensualism. Its gods will be mammon and lust, and 
should it obtain the civil and social ascendency at 
which it aims, it will repeat in the centres of our 
civilization all the scenes of debauchery, cruelty, and 
villainy which were ever enacted in Nineveh, Baby- 
lon, or Rome. It conceals its early advances under 
high-sounding titles and the most plausible profes- 
sions ; but those who have learned that there is no 
true life but the life of self-surrender, and no gen- 
uine liberty, equality, and fraternity outside of the 
spirit of Jesus Christ, cannot long be deceived by its 
pretensions. 

Earnest, noble, and lovable skeptics like Robert 
Owen, Shelley, Jefferson, Darwin, Spencer, Huxley, 
Emerson, Ingersoll, etc., are not the types of what 
the coming atheist will be, but the finished heredi- 
tary products of christian culture, protesting against 
the falsities and corruptions of the christian religion. 
They are tearing down the stones of the old temple, 
unblessed as yet with beatific vision of the new 
temple which is to take its place. They are doing a 
great and necessary work, building greater than they 
know: and we may be sure that all truthful and 
truth-loving souls will finally be delivered from the 
bondage of a sensuous philosophy. 



340 THE END 0F THE world. 

Spiritism, or the development of spiritual phe- 
nomena under evil influences and for evil purposes, 
is a power which is destined to an enormous and 
hideous growth. Its alliance with fraud, cupidity, 
sensuality, and all kinds of radical theories of life 
and government is very apparent to those who have 
studied its complex phenomena. And it is easy to 
foresee its impending alliance with that scientific 
spirit of the age which has separated itself from God 
and His Word. Atheistic scientism, now its scorn- 
ful and deadly enemy, will be after a while its firm 
friend and confederate. As surely as there is a 
divine spiritualism, emanating from the opened 
Word of God and a new Church forming in the 
world above us, and descending by organic affinities 
into everything good and true and pure and noble 
and useful upon earth, wherever found: so surely 
is there its fearful opposite, an infernal spiritism, 
w 7 hich is secretly conjoining itself through organic 
affinities also, with everything false and cruel and 
sensual and destructive in human life. 

These evil influences, associated with correspond- 
ing evils upon earth, and acting through them to stir 
up all the ruling lusts and hatreds of our human 
life (the kings of the earth) against divine things, are 
thus described in the Apocalypse : 



WHAT NEXT AND LAST? 341 

u And I saw three unclean spirits like frogs come out of 
the mouth of the dragon, and out of the mouth of the 
beast, and out of the mouth of the false prophet. 

" For they are the spirits of devils working miracles, 
which go forth unto the kings of the earth, and of the 
whole world to gather them to the battle of that great day 
of God Almighty." Rev. xvi. 13, 14. 

The causes of these spiritual infestations may be 
traced away back to the falsifications of divine truth 
which have marked every step of the history of the 
apostolic Church. Their increase and intensification 
have gradually culminated in that open spiritism 
which the orthodox christian scornfully repudiates, 
and a destructive but concealed form of the same 
evil, of which he is himself the unconscious victim. 
This concealed spiritism prevails extensively in the 
catholic Church, as illustrated by our Lady of 
Lourdes, our Lady of Knock, and other modern 
miracles. Many mysterious phenomena also among 
the Quakers, Shakers, early Methodists, and the 
Mormons are to be explained by its cunning opera- 
tions, which were mistaken for divine influences. 

The alliance of spiritism with naturalism seems 
to be wonderfully foreshadowed in that vision of 
Daniel which w T as partly explained in a former 

chapter. Daniel is contemplating the ten horns, or 

29* 



342 THE END OF THE WORLD. 

examining the sources of power, of that " dreadful 
and terrible beast" which had teeth of iron and nails 
of brass. He says : 

" / considered the horns , and behold, there came up 
among them another Utile horn, before whom there were 
three of the first horns plucked up by the roots : and be- 
hold, in this horn were eyes like the eyes of a man, and a 
mouth speaking great things" Dan. vii. 8. 

This is a new power, added to the already dis- 
played forces and faculties of the monster. It is the 
infusion of human life, eyes, and voices, into what 
was before a merely mechanical and animal struc- 
ture. The animal machine is now guided by human 
intelligence, coming from within outwards, but boast- 
ful and pretentious, and evidently evil, because con- 
joined to such a hideous and destructive creature. 
It is spiritism conjoined to naturalism or that branch 
of it we call atheistic scientism. The horn is called 
little because at first its claims seemed so insignifi- 
cant and absurd as to have but little power. It 
effects a great change, however in the beast. It 
plucks up three of its horns and takes their place. 

What are the three horns of the beast which are 
plucked up by the roots to make way for the horn 



WHAT NEXT AND LAST? 343 

of spiritism ? Three great material bases, or funda- 
mental positions, of atheistic scientism are these : 

First That there is no life but that which is the 
product of chemical combinations, and that no sign 
or communication has ever been received from any 
one known to be dead. This position has been over- 
turned by innumerable evidences of spiritual com- 
munication, as well attested, and as thoroughly au- 
thenticated as any natural phenomenon has ever been. 

Second. That there are no forces in nature except 
those with which we are familiar, and no phenomena 
which cannot be explained by natural laws. Spir- 
itism plucks up this horn by the root by moving 
tables, lifting human bodies, producing musical 
sounds, and doing other astonishing things without 
the agency of any visible means. It also pours 
thought-currents of great power through the brains 
of mediums wholly incapable of producing them. 
The case of Andrew Jackson Davis, who, when he 
was an ignorant, uneducated boy of nineteen, de- 
livered in the trance state the series of lectures called 
u Nature's Divine Revelations," indicating enormous 
learning and research, is a fact entirely beyond ques- 
tion and a puzzle incapable of solution on any 
materialistic theory, " unconscious cerebration" in- 
cluded. 



344 THE END 0F THE world. 

Third. That matter is self-existing, that is, was 
never created, and that no atom of matter has ever 
been added to the stock on hand. Spiritism plucks 
up this horn by materializing flowers, fruits, plants, 
and other substances, by making a seed grow in a 
few minutes into a large bush and by other phe- 
nomena little less than miraculous in the sight of 
the uninitiated. Asiatic spiritism is especially rich 
in these phenomena. 

"Spiritism," says Wilkinson, "will show that 
there is another world which is one with this w T orld ; 
and thus as in the old Edda, it w r ill break in the 
crown of the stone-headed giant, materialism, with 
his own iron pot, for the Thor of mere naturalistic 
fact here smites him. It will contradict effectually 
the scientific position that the amount of force in 
nature is necessarily one and constant, by showing 
invisible wills become visible, and added momenta- 
neously to the force of the race and the push of the 
world. It will show that the dogmas of matter are 
relative and not absolute, and that impenetrability, 
hardness, space, time, etc., are only leased conditions 
and can be suspended at will." 

It is to be noted that the wonders performed by 
the three horns of spiritism are reproductions, or 
rather imitations, of miracles recorded in the Bible. 
In the first class we may place the appearance of 



WHAT NEXT AND LAST? 345 

Samuel to Saul at the summons of the witch of 
Endor, the appearance of Moses and Elias talking 
with Jesus on the mount ; the appearance of saints 
who had long slept to many witnesses just after the 
crucifixion of Christ ; and the appearance of one 
of the old prophets to John in Patmos. (Rev. 
xxii. 9.) 

Of the second class many instances are recorded 
in the Scriptures. New forces flow down into the 
natural from the spiritual world. Gravity is sus- 
pended, water stands still, the winds are hushed, 
iron is made to swim, bolted doors to fly open, 
poisons are antidoted, blindness produced, armies 
destroyed, and transformations of matter effected, 
such as the turning of water into wine, and all with- 
out the manifestation of any material or physical 
agency in the production of the results. Spiritual 
influxes occur also into the minds of men, producing 
new thoughts and powers, of which in their ordinary 
states they are wholly incapable. The Word of God 
was communicated to men in this manner. 

The Bible, in the third place, has its materializa- 
tions far more wonderful than anything spiritism 
has yet produced. The manna, the bread of the 
Israelites in the wilderness, was materialized daily 
for a great many years in quantities sufficient to feed 



346 THE END 0F THE world. 

over half a million people. Elijah's constant repro- 
duction of the widow's oil and meal, and Christ's 
feeding the five thousand people with a few loaves 
and fishes are examples of the same class. 

Spiritism will endeavor to seduce the christian 
mind by showing its apparent marvels and saying, 
See our miraculous powers, and listen to our heaven- 
inspired teachings. On the other hand, it will say 
to the scientists and infidels, See, there was nothing 
in the biblical pretensions to divine influence and 
inspiration, for behold, we repeat the ancient per- 
formances at will and laugh at the credulity of the 
believers. The Swedenborgian philosophy of spirit 
and matter gives the only and perfect solution to the 
question. It shows that no miracle in violation of 
organic laws was ever performed, but that such is 
the relation of the two worlds, that when exterior 
conditions permit or induce a new influx of spiritual 
forces, astounding phenomena are produced, which 
seem miraculous from our stand-point in nature, but 
which are perfectly simple and natural, as we may 
say, when seen from the spiritual side. 

Scientism, however, in adopting spiritism, does 
not intend to admit that there are any spiritual phe- 
nomena. It will accept it as an occult, invisible part 
of nature, containing new and wonderful forces, to 



WHAT NEXT AND LAST? 347 

be discovered and applied by observation and experi- 
ment. Dr. Carpenter's "unconscious cerebration" 
is the first step in that direction. Prof. Crookes's 
" psychic force" is another and more important, be- 
cause he invents it to explain how a musical instru- 
ment can be played upon without the contact of 
human hands or any visible agency. The rest will 
follow. When spiritism is thoroughly amalgamated 
with the naturalism of the age, it will reproduce the 
magic of Egypt, which imitated all the miracles of 
Moses and Aaron. It will increase the wickedness 
of the wicked part of the human race tenfold, and 
prove a more powerful obstacle to enlightened Chris- 
tianity than any which has ever existed, as well as 
the source of terrible temptations to the disciples of 
Christ. 

The prophetic eye of Daniel saw this fact in the 
further history of that little horn, "even of that 
horn that had eyes, and a mouth that spake very 
great things, whose look was more stout than his 
fellows." 

" And he shall speak great words against the most 
High, and shall wear out the saints of the most High : 
and think to change times and laws : and they shall be 
given into his hand until a time and times and the divid- 
ing of time. 



348 THE END 0F THE WORLD. 

" But the judgment shall sit and they shall take away 
his dominion, to consume and to destroy it unto the end. 11 

Naturalism, making use of spiritism as its most 
powerful horn or agent, will speak " very great 
things," presenting us with most plausible philoso- 
phies of life and nature, professing to penetrate and 
explain all the mysteries of the universe. It will be 
pretentious in manner and apparently " more stout" 
or of greater strength than all other agencies. It 
will rage with blasphemy and animosity against 
Christ, against His holy Word, and all divine 
things. It will labor and hope to change the man- 
ners and customs and the moral states of the world. 
It will assail the christian life with special hatred, 
and christians, so far as their own evil states may 
require, will be delivered over to be tempted and 
tormented by it until the fulness of time or state, 
when they will be liberated from its power by the 
divine judgments. 

What will be the result of the collisions between 
these various forces now drawn up in battle array 
on the great field of human history? We may per- 
haps be able to get a clearer glimpse of the probable 
future, if we will study the points of difference be- 
tween the new dispensation now inaugurated and 
those which have preceded it. 



WHAT NEXT AND LAST? 349 

The first thing which strikes us forcibly is its 
finality. It is declared by the Word and by Swe- 
denborg that the judgment on the apostolic Church 
and the revelations which accompany it are the last 
of a series. Other Churches began their life in the 
full glow of divine inspiration and gradually de- 
clined in spiritual purity and strength, going through 
successive internal states comparable to morning, 
noon, evening, and night, or to spring, summer, 
autumn, and winter. Each Church was a prepara- 
tion for another. This last Church will undergo no 
deterioration whatever, no falsification of doctrine. 
Its truths will steadily advance upon all the strong- 
holds of sin and error. They will triumph in the 
contest, and however dark and terrible the transition 
may be, we are sure that the new heaven and the 
new earth will be the result. Causes have been Set 
to work in the world of spirits which cannot stop 
half-way, but which must cleave down, through 
man and nature, and finish the mystery of God, so 
that the world shall be reconstructed according to 
the divine will. This is one reason why the im- 
pending history of mankind must be very different 
from anything which has preceded. 

This is the sunset hour of the world. Morning, 

noon, and evening have passed and the night cometh, 

30 



350 THE END 0F THE WORLD. 

after which will dawn the eternal day. The spring, 
the summer, the autumn are over, and from the win- 
ter we now feel will rise another but a perpetual 
spring. The ages of gold, silver, and copper are 
ended, and we shall pass from the present horrible 
mixture of part iron and part clay into a new and 
endless age of gold. As He began, so will He finish. 

The second great difference is that the revelation 
made for the use of this dispensation is a revelation 
of spiritual truth. Former revelations contained 
spiritual truth concealed under literal symbols. A 
spirit of literal interpretation therefore prevailed, so 
that the genuine significance and power of divine 
truth was w T ell nigh lost to the Church. The letter 
killeth, the spirit giveth life, was the apostle's warn- 
ing, given but seldom heeded. This revelation is no 
new addition to the Word of God, but an unfolding 
of the signification which is attached to it by the 
angels of heaven. This is spiritual truth, and the 
illuminations and inspirations of which it is capable 
are at present utterly unknown to the world. 

Now spiritual truth brings into judgment, sure, 
merciful, but thorough, and its hands cannot be 
stayed. It is the divine power which separates the 
false from the true, the evil from the good, in our 
spiritual natures. It is the power which separates 



WHAT NEXT AND LAST? 351 

the good from the incorrigibly wicked in the world 
of spirits, drawing the one into heaven and repelling 
the other into hell. That power is now let loose 
upon the earth. It descends like a subtle atmos- 
phere over the whole race, not only from the works 
of Swedenborg, but from the Divine Word wherever 
read or heard, and mainly through the world of 
spirits, with which our affections and thoughts are 
secretly bound up, and from whence we are mostly 
influenced. The consequence is that men are grad- 
ually undergoing in this world and before death, 
altogether unconsciously to themselves, the explora- 
tions, separations, and judgments which have hith- 
erto rarely occurred until after death. 

The good are therefore growing better and the 
evil worse with great rapidity. The two resurrec- 
tions occur simultaneously : the resurrection of the 
good into an exalted and consecrated religious life, 
and the resurrection of the evil into a life of inten- 
sified wickedness. Spiritual truth will not convert 
the wicked or draw them to Christ. It is the Son 
come to judgment. No man comes to Christ except 
the Father draws him, that is, except as he yields 
his will and its affections to the sweet and attractive 
influences of the divine love or goodness. Those 
who resist this are now being brought into judg- 



352 THE EXD OF THE WORLD. 

ment, and sentence is being passed, for they are left 
to the gratification of their own desires, the spirit of 
correction and reproof having been withdrawn. The 
wicked therefore are feeling more self-complacent 
and at ease in their wickedness than ever before. 
The external form of humanity remains the same, 
but interiorly they are given up to their own lusts 
and phantasies. Hence the loss of conscience, and 
the increasing shamelessness of crime. 

In proportion as the good are relieved from the 
pressure of evil spheres about them, they wake to a 
deeper consciousness of the divine life stirring with- 
in them. They die, sometimes quietly and uncon- 
sciously, to the old creeds, the old forms, the old 
issues. Their charity grows warmer, their humanity 
larger, their sense of brotherhood more loving and 
tender. New and grand ideals are born within them. 
They see that to "walk even as He walked" demands 
a perfect sanctification of soul and redemption of 
body. Conscious that the Church and society are 
tainted to the core with evils that can never be 
cured, they feel as if they were shut up in deep 
prisons, hemmed in on all sides by insuperable ob- 
stacles. They are the souls under the altar, be- 
headed for the testimony of Jesus, and crying, " O 
Lord, how long ?" 



WHAT NEXT AND LAST? 353 

Now it is evident that the line of fissure or de- 
markation between these two great classes must grow 
deeper continually until there is an impassable gulf 
between them, the incorrigibly wicked on the one 
hand and the salvable of every degree from greatest 
to least on the other. In the great contests between 
them, all the institutions of the world, ecclesiastical, 
civil, and social, will no doubt be greatly modified 
or overturned, and a new order pf things come about. 
But as these two great classes can never amalgamate, 
and neither can win over or conquer the other, it 
seems quite clear that the Kingdom of God cannot 
be a universal dominion and heaven be realized 
upon earth according to the promises, until the in- 
corrigibly wicked are permanently removed from the 
world. 

The prophecies of the final restoration or restitu- 
tion of all things into correspondence with the 
heavenly life, by the separation or segregation of the 
wicked, so that the righteous shall inherit the earth, 
and the commune of Christ be forever established, 
abound in the sacred Scriptures, in both their literal 
and their spiritual senses. A very few will suffice. 

" The Son of Man shall send forth his angels , and they 

shall gather out of his kingdom all things that offend, and 

them tchich do iniquity : 

x 30* 



354 THE END 0F THE WORLD. 

"And shall cast them into a furnace of fire ." Matt, 
xiii. 41. 

" They drew to shore and sat down, and gathered the 
good into vessels but cast the bad away." 

"So shall it be at the end of the world: the angels 
shall come forth and shall sever the wicked from among 
the just. 1 ' Matt. xiii. 48, 49. 

" There shall be two in the field : the one shall be taken 
and the other left." Matt. xxiv. 40. 

" And he shall separate them one from another, as a 
shepherd divideth his sheep from the goats" Matt. xxv. 32. 

" But that which beareth thorns and briers is rejected, 
and is nigh unto cursing, whose end is to be burned." Heb. 
vi. 8. 

It is undoubtedly true that all these things take 
place in each individual soul as the effect of the 
judgments of divine truth. The good and the evil 
principles are separated, and the evils are cast out 
into hell from whence they came. But the indi- 
vidual is the least form or miniature of the Church, 
and man is a microcosm or miniature of the macro- 
cosm or world ; and whatever is said in the Word 
of the aggregate or composite form is said also of 
each one of the units of which it is composed, and 
vice versa. The good and the evil in all forms must 
be at last separated in the world of nature as an ulti- 



WHAT NEXT AND LAST? 355 

mate correspondence of the higher separation effected 
in the spiritual sphere. 

That the great process of judgment which began 
in the world of spirits in 1757 will be continued in 
principle in the world of nature, until the old dis- 
pensation is thoroughly uprooted and destroyed, the 
good part of it being absorbed into the new, and the 
evil utterly separated from the good and doomed to 
destruction, when the true and final end of the world 
shall occur, may be inferred from the following par- 
agraphs from Swedenborg's Apocalypse Explained, 
No. 624. 

"The non-upright are to be separated from the 
upright or simple good, before the coming of judg- 
ment, and after it, and this separation can only be 
effected successively." 

" That on account of this reason the time is pro- 
traded after the last judgment before the new Church 
is fully established, is an arcanum from heaven which 
at this day [in the last century] can only enter the 
understanding of a few : and yet this is what the 
Lord teaches in the following passages in Matthew : 

" So the servants of the householder came and said unto 
him , Sir, didst thou not sow good seed in thy field? from 
whence then hath it tares ? 
" And he said unto them, An enemy hath done this. 



356 THE END OF THE WORLD. 

The servants said unto him, Wilt thou then that we go and 
gather them up ? 

" But he said, Nay : lest while ye gather up the tares, 
ye root up also the wheat with them. 

"Let them both grow together until the harvest : and in 
the time of harvest, I will say to the reapers, Gather ye 
together first the tares, and bind them in bundles to bum 
them, but gather the wheat into my barn" xiii. 27-30. 

" He that soweth the good seed is the Son of Man : 

" The field is the world: the good seed are the children 
of the kingdom, but the tares are the children of the wicked 
one : 

" The enemy that sowed them is the devil : the harvest 
is the end of the world : and the reapers are the angels. 

" As therefore the tares are gathered and burned in the 
fire, so shall it be in the end of this world." 37-40. 

To this great consummation will all forces both 
spiritual and natural henceforth conspire. 

How is this separation to be made ? There is but 
one plausible conjecture, and we are led to it by 
many literal expressions of the Word. The myths 
of all antiquity also point to the fact that the wicked 
are to be destroyed and the world purified by fire. 
In the last great battle between good and evil, seen 
by John, when Gog and Magog gathered together 
as the sand of the sea, it is said, 



WHAT NEXT AND LAST; 357 

" And they went up on the breadth of the earth, and 
compassed the camp of the saints about, and the beloved 
city : and fire came down from God out of heaven and 
devoured them. 11 Rev. xx. 9. 

The fate of " the terrible beast" which had the 
iron teeth and the nails of brass, representing the 
naturalism of the latter days, and the little horn 
representing its conjunction with spiritism, is thus 
described by Daniel : 

" I beheld then because of the voice of the great words 
which the horn spake : I beheld even till the beast was 
slain, and his body destroyed, and given to the burning 
flame." Dan. vii. 11. 

Why is fire the only element mentioned in the 
final destruction of the wicked? There are winds 
and waters, and lightnings and earthquakes, and 
famines and innumerable species of diseases which 
correspond also to the perturbations of the moral 
world, and which would surely destroy those who 
have corresponding evils in their spirits, if good 
were thoroughly separated or taken from them, and 
they were left to the merciless operations of the or- 
ganic laws which govern both spirit and matter. 
The wicked will be destroyed by all these agencies, 



358 THE END 0F THE world. 

but fire is a comprehensive word which in the spir- 
itual sense includes them all. Heat is the primal 
source of all the forces of nature. Love is the 
primal source of all the forces of spirit. If we 
strip these great forces of all the secondary forms 
and appearances they may assume, we get down to 
the genuine substratum of elemental fire, spiritual 
or natural. 

From what great store-house of fire will this de- 
structive element proceed, which will select and 
discriminate with unerring certainty between the 
evil and the good ? From the great store-house of 
burning lusts and evil passions which constitute the 
life of the wicked. It will be spiritual fire material- 
ized into natural fire, or let down from the spiritual 
to the natural sphere. It will therefore only touch 
and consume that to which it corresponds, all evil 
persons, all evil things, vicious animals, poisonous 
plants, germs of disease, all impurities, and every- 
thing that mars the peace and harmony of the nat- 
ural world. It may be a million times more intense 
than the electro-galvanic cautery, so that everything 
it touches, or out of which it proceeds, shall crumble 
into dust or dissolve into gases, without creating the 
slightest disturbance, chemical or otherwise, in the 
rest of the world. 



WHAT NEXT AND LAST? 359 

" And the slain of the Lord shall be at that day from 
one end of the earth even unto the other end of the earth; 
they shall not be lamented, neither gathered, nor buried" — 
Jer. xxv. 33. 



Little do we know of the nature of fire ! The 
chemist defines the sun to be a great mass of com- 
bustible material in a state of ignition, and boldly 
predicts the time will come when it will crumble 
into ashes and so perish. Inconceivable stupidity ! 
The fire of the sun is God's love, materialized from 
moment to moment into the great natural force which 
creates and upholds and blesses all things. It will 
perish when He does, and not before. We, images 
of God, have in ourselves also the sources of fire. 
We all have that in our evil spiritual natures, which, 
if it were permitted to flow into us and turn into its 
corresponding material form, would consume us with 
mortal agony. 

The following materializations of fire, or its ap- 
pearance without adequate physical cause, are re- 
corded in the Word. 

The destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah by " fire 
from the Lord out of heaven." Gen. xix. 24. 

The flame of fire which appeared to Moses in the 
midst of the bush. Ex. iii. 2. 



360 THE END 0F THE WORLD. 

The fire which "ran along the ground" at the 
command of Moses in Egypt. Ex. ix. 23. 

The pillar of fire which appeared to the Israelites 
every night in the wilderness. Ex. iii. 21. 

When Aaron made his first offerings under the 
new ritual, " there came a fire out from before the 
Lord and consumed them." Lev. ix. 24. 

When the sons of Aaron offered strange fire on 
the altar, "fire from the Lord" went out and de- 
stroyed them. Lev. x. 2. 

Fire from the Lord consumed many of the peo- 
ple on account of their wickedness, and was only 
quenched at the prayer of Moses. Num. xi. 1. 

" There rose up fire out of the rock" to consume 
the offering of Gideon. Judg. vi. 21. 

The fire which came down from heaven at the 
contest between Elijah and the prophets of Baal 
"consumed the burnt sacrifice, and the wood and 
the stones and the dust and the water that was in 
the trench." 1 Kings xviii. 38. 

Fire from heaven destroyed two companies of 
fifty men each at the command of Elijah. 2 Kings 
i. 10. 

Cloven tongues of fire appeared to all the people 
and rested upon the apostles. Acts ii. 3. 

These things are utterly discredited by the scien- 



WHAT XEXT AND LAST? 361 

tific and rationalistic spirit of the age. They are 
believed by christians only on the forced ground that 
they are miracles, or special interruptions and viola- 
tions of natural law. The New Churchman takes 
the infinitely higher ground, that they are facts, sim- 
ple occurrences, such as may be reproduced at any 
moment by the influx of spiritual forces into natural 
media under certain conditions. 

We can easily conceive that after this great catas- 
trophe, the last act in a long scries of judgments, 
those who remain upon the earth wid be gradually 
organized under spiritual influences into societies and 
governments after heavenly models. The spirit of 
the old Churches will remain lingering for a while 
but will pass away, for Daniel says, after the beast 
was burned : 

u As concerning the rest of the beasts, they had their 
dominion taken away : yet their lives icere prolonged for 
a season and time." 

The long latent but tremendous capacities of the 
Asiatic and African races for spiritual and celestial 
life will be opened and revived. The work of re- 
generation will proceed with immense rapidity. The 
commune of Christ will be established. The will 

of God will be done upon earth as in heaven. The 
Q 31 



362 THE END 0F THE WORLD. 

Word of God in its spiritual sense, revealed by 
Swedenborg, and its celestial sense still to be opened, 
will be the sole guide of human life, and the centre 
of all light and knowledge. 

If the physical globe is not to be destroyed ; if the 
new heaven and the new earth are to be located upon 
it; if the perfect form of human society predicted 
in the Scriptures is to be realized indeed ; if the last 
judgment has been executed ; if the Divine Word 
has been opened, and causes set into operation which 
must destroy all evil things and establish for perpe- 
tuity the final Kingdom of God upon earth, then 
must we expect a total and radical revolution in all 
the internal and external forms of human life. Our 
odious religiosity must utterly disappear. The will 
of God must be done in all the minutest actions of 
the human will. The religion of the whole world 
and of every individual in it must be HOLINESS 
UNTO THE LORD. 

This glorious state of individual and cosmical re- 
generation is described in the twenty-second chapter 
of Revelation under the figure of the holy city, the 
new Jerusalem, descending from God out of heaven. 
This state is impossible until the resurrection, de- 
scribed in the preceding chapter, has taken place. 
The chapters of the Divine Word are beautifully 



WHAT NEXT AND LAST? 363 

and wonderfully related to each other, but only the 
spiritual sense can reveal the logic of their connec- 
tion. There can be no final and perfect redeemed 
state of society, until there is a death of all the old 
life of our carnal and selfish nature, and a resurrec- 
tion of all our thoughts and feelings into the new 
and endless life of Jesus Christ. The old Babylon, 
which exists in every one of us, as well as in the 
catholic religion, and which means all the lusts of 
the selfhood in relation to spiritual things, must be 
overwhelmed and destroyed, as described in the 
seventeenth and eighteenth chapters. 

In proportion as the lusts of the selfhood are sub- 
dued and cast out, we become capable of recognizing 
and believing the divine truth. Accordingly in the 
nineteenth chapter, the heavens are opened and the 
Word of God is described as riding forth on a white 
horse followed by the armies of heaven upon white 
horses. This is the last and grandest of the revela- 
tions. His eyes shine as fire to indicate the divine 
wisdom glowing with the fervor of the divine love. 
He has many crowns upon his head, because he 
will govern at last in every department of human 
thought and life. He had a name written which 
no man knew but himself, that is, an infinite and 
divine quality beyond the reach of human compre- 



364 THE END 0F THE world. 

hension. His vesture was dipped in blood, to show 
the violence done to the Divine Word by the falsifi- 
cations of the letter. 

It is because the spiritual sense of the Word is 
opened, that a great proclamation is made to the 
fowls of heaven to gather themselves together to the 
supper of the great God. The fowls of heaven are 
all the intellectual and rational faculties of the 
human mind, which are invited to feast upon the 
spiritual truths now revealed in the Word, and 
which explain all the phenomena of life, of nature, 
and of history, and which conjoin us to heaven 
and the Lord. That invitation is now being made 
throughout the civilized world. 

Great will be the opposition of the so-called 
Church and the world to the spiritual truths of the 
Word of God contained in its internal sense. 

" And I saw the beasts and the kings of the earth, and 
their armies gathered together to make war upon him that 
sat on the horse and against his army" 

All the Churches and institutions in the world, 
the old heaven and the old earth, are founded upon 
a literal and sensuous interpretation, not only of the 
Word of God, but of all the phenomena of nature 
and of human life. This false philosophy, engen- 



WHAT NEXT AND LAST? 365 

dering false religions and false institutions of all 
sorts, is now confronted with a vast, sublime, and 
true spiritual philosophy of the universe, emanating 
from the opened Word of God. The resulting con- 
flict will be the great intellectual and theological war 
in the future. The old clergy will probably resist 
the new truth with great obstinacy and bitterness. 
The Word of God will eventually prevail : all other 
systems will succumb and perish : and mankind will 
be freed forever from their incubus and their scourge. 
Then, and then only, will come the universal re- 
generation of the race, which is figured under the 
type of a millennial reign with Christ. Those who 
have read thus far in this volume will perceive 
the sensuous fallacy of the orthodox millennium. 
Christ reigns upon earth when He reigns in our 
hearts. He reigns for a thousand years, when our 
states of holiness are great and strong, for times ex- 
press the spiritual states of our life, and increasing 
numbers applied to time indicate only the increasing 
intensification of the state. We reign with Christ 
when we overcome all evil as He did. The whole 
earth shall be heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ. 
Satan shall be dethroned and bound in prison. All 
evil will be suppressed in the world. The most per- 
fect external order will reign. The thoughts and 

31* 



366 THE END OF THE WORLD. 

feelings of mankind will have been lifted up with 
Christ above the plane of the carnal nature. This is 
the first or primary spiritual resurrection, which pre- 
cludes the possibility of the second or spiritual death. 

Good and beautiful as this state is, in the individ- 
ual and in the race, it is not the final state. Satan 
bound and in prison is not the same as Satan en- 
tirely cast out into the lake of fire. Our most ex- 
alted states of holiness, our highest reign with 
Christ, will be temporary so long as evil is sup- 
pressed in us only by the power of divine truth. 
When our hearts are so thoroughly changed by 
living and walking with Christ, that we sponta- 
neously love the good and hate the evil, Satan is 
loosed again, we are let into new temptations and 
conflicts, but we fight from a different stand-point and 
with different weapons. We bind and suppress evil 
by the power of divine truth : but we give it a final 
judgment and cast it out forever by the power of 
the divine love. That fire from God out of heaven 
which destroys the last remnant of evil in us is the 
divine love which lifts our purified affections into the 
eternal light and peace of God. 

This suppression of evil, this temporary reign 
with Christ, this return of temptations, this renewed 
conflict, and triumph as by fire, are all matters of 



WHAT NEXT AND LAST? 357 

common christian experience. These phenomena 
will be continued and intensified in the individual 
and the race until Christ shall reign supreme in 
both, until the restitution of all things to the origi- 
nal glory of Eden, and until Christ delivers up His 
kingdom unto the Father, or until men are no longer 
governed by the dictates of truth and the sense of 
duty, but by the divine love, which includes all 
truth and all duty, spontaneously welling forth from 
their regenerated natures. 

There is another great event, almost incomprehen- 
sible in our materialistic age, the occurrence of which 
in the future would be in accordance with the phil- 
osophy of Swedenborg. That event is the return 
of the race into the spiritual and organic conditions 
in which it existed before the fall. The men of the 
antediluvian age differed immensely from the people 
of the present day. Their interior senses were 
opened, and they lived in easy communication with 
spirits and angels. They felt, thought, and acted 
from the spiritual side of their nature, and not as we 
do from the physical and material side. 

They did not acquire knowledge of natural objects 
by observation, experiment, and reasonings about 
their qualities and relations. They saw intuitively 
into the soul of things. From a perception of spirit- 



368 THE END 0F THE would. 

ual causes they grasped the whole bearing of physi- 
cal effects. They understood anatomy and physi- 
ology without dissection of dead bodies or vivisection 
of living animals, geology without excavation, chem- 
istry without experiment. They took no thought of 
external and literal things because they saw their 
spiritual meanings. They left behind them there- 
fore no written records, historical or scientific. To 
their descendants whose spiritual senses were closed, 
their very existence became a myth. 

The loss of that heavenly state of life by disobe- 
dience and sin, and the consequent closure of the 
spiritual senses, leaving men immersed as we are in 
the darkness of nature, was the origin of the myth 
of a fall of angels out of heaven, those unhappy 
" angels who kept not their first estate." That state 
can be restored to us by the general and permanent 
reopening of the spiritual senses. This will be 
effected when the Church in heaven and the Church 
on earth are one, when they breathe simultaneously 
the same thoughts, and conspire consentaneously with 
similar affections. 

It is a matter of respiration. The closure of spir- 
itual respiration sank the antediluvians from com- 
munication with heaven down into the prison of 
nature. The opening of spiritual respiration will 



WHAT NEXT AND LAST? 3g9 

lift the race from the depths of naturalism into free 
intercourse with the spiritual world. Sensation, or 
the perception of things, depends upon respiration. 
As soon as a child breathes, its senses are opened : it 
can see, hear, smell, taste, and feel, but not before. 
So it is with the spiritual life, to which all things of 
the natural life correspond. If the respiration of 
the spiritual lungs be consciously opened, we are 
born as it were into the spiritual world : we see that 
world ; we hear its people speak ; we breathe its at- 
mosphere; we can touch, taste, handle, and explore 
all its beautiful and wonderful substances. We can 
live consciously, actively, and intelligently in both 
worlds at the same time. 

Such was the double life of the antediluvians. 
Such was the organic condition of Swedenborg for 
more than thirty years. Other men, since his time, 
some of them now living, have enjoyed similar ex- 
periences. After the destruction of the wicked, and 
the perfect resurrection of the righteous from every 
dead state, suet will be the life of the whole human 
race. All this seems to be involved in that wonder- 
ful verse : 

" Arid I saw a new heaven and a new earth: for the 
first heaven and the first earth were passed away, and there 
was no more sea." 

y 



370 THE END OF THE WORLD. 

The sea is the ultimate border of the land, yield- 
ing inferior forms of being and incapable of main- 
taining human life. It represents therefore the 
lowest or most external parts of our nature, what we 
may call the scientific sphere, in which we interpret 
everything from the evidences of the senses. In the 
new heaven and the new earth, all this external or 
sensuous way of thinking, feeling, and acting is to 
pass utterly away with the old false religions and 
false philosophies, which were constructed and cor- 
rupted by the fallacies of the same senses. This 
troubled sea which casteth up mire and dirt will dis- 
appear forever. Our spiritual senses will be opened, 
and the currents of thought and life will flow from 
within outwards, from above downwards, and the 
spiritual will understand, modify, and dominate the 
natural in the minutest particulars. 

If one of the apostles, without understanding the 
rationale or mechanism of the phenomenon, had seen 
a vision of the opening respiration of the race, and 
the astounding effect of a simultaneous intromission 
into the spiritual world, he would have described it 
as being " caught up to meet the Lord in the air." 
If he had seen a vision of the influences now de- 
scending from heaven to earth, he would have called 
it a coming of the Lord with all His holy angels to 



WHAT NEXT AND LAST? 371 

judge the world. And as the vision would have 
showed him the forms of those who had been long 
dead mingled with the living, he would have pro- 
claimed that there would be a resurrection of dead 
bodies at the end of time. 

In this manner the disciples misinterpreted a phe- 
nomenon which occurred just after the crucifixion of 
the Lord. Their own spiritual sight was partially 
opened, unconsciously to themselves, and seeing cer- 
tain of their deceased friends, they reported that 
some of the saints who slept had risen from their 
graves and appeared unto many. 

The end is involved in the beginning, and all 
things return to the point from which they started. 
Our return however to the age of gold, to the spir- 
itual Eden of God, will not be a return like that of 
a simple circle to the same point, but like that of a 
spiral, or ascending circle, to a higher but still cor- 
responding point. We shall pass from our present 
state of religious decrepitude into that eternal child- 
hood which is receptive of the kingdom of heaven. 
Man will be innocent again, but it will be the inno- 
cence of wisdom and not of ignorance. Hell, thor- 
oughly subjected, will be made antipodal or under 
his feet, never to rise and vex his peace again. 
Heaven will be immediately above him, ever open 



372 THE END 0F THE WORLD. 

to his inspection so that friends will never be parted, 
and it will receive him into its eternal home, by a 
beautiful and happy translation like that of Elijah, 
when he has filled his allotted mission upon the 
earth. Death will be abolished, and the human race 
will be made one with each other in the life of Christ, 
even as He is one with the Father. 



CHAPTER XIII. 

THE KEYS OF HISTOEY. 

nnHE reader is now prepared for a little more in- 
-*- sight into that spiritual philosophy of history 
which has been hinted at throughout this volume, 
and which alone can bring the beginning and the 
end of the world together. 

The spiritual philosophy is the only true philoso- 
phy of anything. Creation is always a circumfer- 
ence which refers itself to God, the uncreated life, as 
a centre. The objects of the natural world are only 
materializations from the more real and more per- 
manent substances of the spiritual world. The so- 
called forces of nature are merely spiritual forces 
acting through physical media. All genuine, pri- 
mary causes lie in the spiritual world. Therefore 
nature and history are mirrors in which are reflected 
the interior movements of the spiritual life and the 
organic and orderly evolutions of the divine will. 

The keys to the mysteries of man and nature can- 
not be discovered by observation and experiment 

32 373 



374 THE END OF THE WORLD. 

from the scientific stand-point. They must be re- 
vealed from heaven, nor can the merely rational and 
scientific faculty discern them, but they are readily 
perceived by a certain spiritual insight which is 
given to man in proportion to his life of obedience, 
charity, and faith. It is something entirely above 
the criticism or the reach of the natural man. Sim- 
ple-minded and sincere Christians, " the babes and 
sucklings" of the Word, can receive what I am 
going to write far more easily than the most learned 
and enthusiastic disciples of modern scientism, which 
Carlyle has designated "the gospel of dirt." 

There are three discrete or distinct degrees of 
spiritual life, and therefore three distinct heavens 
with three degrees of beings and substances. They 
are called celestial, spiritual, and natural. These 
heavens rest upon our physical nature as a basis, 
and all their inhabitants were once men upon earth. 
They are connected together by the influx of the 
divine life through them, that life taking on celestial 
forms in the highest sphere, spiritual forms in the 
middle sphere, and natural forms in the lowest 
sphere. 

This threefold spiritual world flows into our ma- 
terial world, producing all the corresponding forms 
of the animal, vegetable, and mineral kingdoms; 



THE KEYS OF HISTORY. 375 

The world of nature therefore corresponds to the 
spiritual world in the minutest particulars, and if 
our eyes were opened to the spiritual meanings of 
things, we could read as in a book the living records 
of the divine love, wisdom, and power as manifested 
in the spiritual creation. "As above, so below" was 
one of the wisest axioms of the most ancient philos- 
ophy. 

Every human being born into this world is a min- 
iature form or image of the three heavens, having 
the celestial, spiritual, and natural degrees of life 
enfolded and concealed within the sensuo-corporeal 
forms of his earthly life. He is born, like an ani- 
mal, into the lowest or sensuo-corporeal degrees, but 
his mind may be opened, according to his life and 
conduct, into either of the spiritual degrees, and he 
becomes after death an inhabitant of the first, second, 
or third heaven, or of the opposite and correspond- 
ing hell. 

The first men upon the earth had the life of the 
celestial degree, which is the first emanation from 
the divine life, infused consciously into the sensuo- 
corporeal or animal basis, and were therefore called 
celestial men. The spiritual and natural degrees 
were quiescent or unopened in those people. They 
had open intercourse with the spirits of their de- 



376 THE END 0F THE WORLD. 

parted friends, and their death was only a happy 
translation, like that of Enoch or Elijah, from one 
sphere to another. The divine influx flowed directly 
into their will and not as afterwards into the under- 
standing in the form of truth to be obeyed, and they 
therefore thought, felt, and acted unlike any people 
who have existed since. 

* They had no literature, no science, no govern- 
ments, in the modern sense of these terms. Nature 
was an open book to them, a superb mirror, reflecting 
the spiritual wonders of the universe. They saw the 
divine meaning in the greatest and the least of 
things. They were adult children, innocent, wise, 
and happy. The good of that era, and for a long 
time all were good, are now the angels of the highest, 
celestial, or third heaven, whom Paul and Sweden- 
borg were permitted to see: and so great was the 
evolution of the divine plan in the course of eighteen 
centuries, that the latter was commissioned to com- 
municate to mankind the very information which 
the former was forbidden to give. 

In process of time, and by means not necessary in 
this place to detail, sin and evil became general and 
a great change came over the human race. In that 
antediluvian era correspondences were in power, that 
is, the divine life flowed directly from the celestial 



THE KEYS OF HISTORY. 377 

into the physical sphere and moulded the latter into 
correspondence with the former, so that interior 
changes in the spiritual life of the race were imme- 
diately represented by corresponding exterior changes 
in the human body and in physical nature. 

It is only since the closure of the Interior degrees 
of the human mind, that things below are not made 
to correspond exactly with things above, that a man 
can smile and be a villain, or that he can entertain 
wicked passions and not turn lurid red, or immerse 
himself into false persuasions and not become dis- 
gustingly black. The evils and falsities of these an- 
tediluvians were represented outwardly, and wrought 
those anatomical changes which are attributed by 
natural philosophers to climatic and other causes. 

The black and red skins, the woolly or coarse 
straight hair, the thick lips, the stunted form, the 
shallow skull, the flat nose, the projecting jaw and 
teeth, the offensive smell, and other peculiarities 
approaching the animal tribes, were not the original 
conditions of men, but were imposed gradually and 
successively, increasing by heredity, upon the ante- 
diluvian form, as physical correspondences to the 
brutalizing operations going on within the soul. 
Only in the doctrines of Influx, Degrees, and Cor- 
respondences as taught by Swedenborg can we ever 

32* 



378 THE END 0F THE WORLD. 

find the true keys to the anatomy, the ethnology, the 
languages, and the history of all the different races 
of men. 

Spiritual causes thus operating correspondentially 
into nature would have bestialized the whole of 
mankind and "destroyed their rationality and free 
agency, had not the Creator closed the celestial de- 
gree of life, and opened a new or spiritual degree, 
and so saved the human race. This great change in 
the spiritual conditions of human life produced that 
catastrophe described in the Word under the symbol 
of a flood. 

Swedenborg is not absolutely explicit upon this 
point, but it is a fair inference that a large portion 
of the human race perished, or were suffocated as 
under water, by the closure of the interior respira- 
tion which connected them consciously with the spir- 
itual world. In a few, a " remnant," represented by 
Noah and his family, the spiritual degree of the 
human mind was opened, and a new or spiritual 
Church was instituted, from which the second or 
spiritual heaven was at first peopled. Those in 
whom the spiritual degree could not be opened, and 
who still had some celestial " remains" or potentiali- 
ties left deeply stored away in their souls, sank down 
into the sensuo-corporeal sphere, and have ever since 



THE KEYS OF HISTORY. 379 

lived a savage life, but little elevated above that of 
the brutes, adults with the faculties of children with- 
out the innocence of childhood. 

Swedenborg says the African is a remnant of the 
celestial type, a perverted form and fragment of the 
antediluvian era. Grossly sensual and barbarian as 
he now is, in his outward nature, the "remains" 
which lie embedded in his mental structures are of 
the celestial order. He is organically connected 
with the highest heaven and the deepest hell as no 
other man or race of men upon this earth ever has 
been or can be. Proofs of his innate celestial genius 
are still apparent in the best specimens of his species, 
in his ineradicable childishness, his light- heartedness, 
simplicity, credulity, timidity, fidelity, in his passion 
for music and dancing, in his faculty and love of 
imitating, in his forgiving temper, his docile spirit, 
and that beautiful willingness to serve and keep 
serving, which is a special characteristic of the 
race. 

The other remnants of the antediluvian era are 
probably the old aborigines of all countries, who 
have been driven out and mostly exterminated by 
succeeding races. These people, barbarians, have 
never invented an alphabet nor adopted one, and 
therefore have no literature, no science, no organized 



380 THE END 0F THE WORLD. 

religion, no rational government. They lead the 
sensuo-corporeal life of animals, with merely the 
exterior-natural, as Swedenborg calls it, of human 
life. They do not observe and accumulate facts so 
as to cultivate the scientific principle ; nor have they 
the least idea of the rational, which is still more in- 
terior and vital. These are the men, debris of a 
remote past, whom the scientists suppose to be types 
of the primitive man advancing slowly to our 
modern stand-point. On the contrary they are ex- 
hausted races, totally different from ourselves, utterly 
unprogressive, and who do not improve but perish 
at the approach of our civilization. 

"Were the savage the primitive man," says 
Trench, in his " Study of Words," " we should 
then find savage tribes furnished, scantily enough 
it might be, with the elements of speech, yet at the 
same time with its fruitful beginnings, its vigorous 
and healthful germs. But what does their language 
on close inspection prove ? In every case, what they 
are themselves, the remnant and ruin of a better and 
nobler past. Fearful indeed is the impress of deg- 
radation which is stamped upon the language of 
the savage, more fearful even than that which is 
stamped upon his form." 

" Yet with all this, ever and anon in the midst 
of this wreck and ruin, there is that in the language 



THE KEYS OF HISTORY. %%\ 

of the savage, some subtile distinction, some curious 
allusion to a perished civilization, now utterly unin- 
telligible to the speaker ; or some other note which 
proclaims his language to be the remains of a dis- 
sipated inheritance, the rags and remnants of a robe 
w T hich was a royal one once. The fragments of a 
broken sceptre are in his hand, a sceptre wherewith 
he, or rather his progenitors, once held dominion 
over large kingdoms of thought, which have now 
escaped wholly from his sway." 

On the opening of the spiritual degree of the 
human mind, a new and spiritual Church was es- 
tablished, which extended throughout the most of 
Asia and radiated, as a Church always does, a secret 
and energizing spiritual influence throughout the 
whole world. With the opening of the spiritual 
degree of the human mind, came the establishment 
of priesthoods, and kingdoms, and empires, with 
complex political forms and theological mysteries. 
These people had a written revelation from heaven, 
to which allusion is made and from which extracts 
are taken by the inspired writers of the subsequent 
and larger Word. They possessed a clear knowledge 
of the science of correspondences, which is the 
reason that the religions, philosophies, and litera- 
tures of the most ancient oriental world, are so full 



382 THE END 0F THE world. 

of symbolisms, which are inexplicable to the scientist 
and evolutionist, and betray the possession of a light 
not of this world. 

This phase of human life was very peculiar. It 
was the spiritual degree based directly and con- 
sciously upon the sensuo-eorporeal or animal life. 
The celestial degree was closed, and the natural 
degree in which we live and think was altogether 
unopened. These people are therefore quite incom- 
prehensible to us. They also declined downward 
to evils of life and falsities of doctrine, perverted 
and corrupted the truth, ceased to think spiritually, 
and sunk into the vilest sensualism, represented by 
the idolatries of ancient Canaan and the false science 
and magic of Egypt. 

The spiritual degree of the human mind was at 
length closed as the celestial had been, and a new 
descending degree, the natural, opened for the salva- 
tion and perpetuation of the race. The catastrophe 
was represented by the destruction of Sodoui and 
Gomorrah, the extermination of the Canaanites, and 
no doubt by many great events, which our extreme 
ignorance of the times has concealed from our view. 

We may safely say that the Hindoos, Chinese, 
Japanese, etc., etc., are descendants of those people, 
who from having been spiritual became sensuo- 



THE KEYS OF HISTORY. 383 

corporeal. They differ from Indians and Negroes 
in being what we call semi-civilized, — but they have 
been for ages stagnant and unprogressive. Their 
religion, their philosophy, their science, indeed, 
everything about them, is fossilized, petrified, crys- 
tallized, nor can any European voice, unless it be the 
voice of Swedenborg, pronounce the Sesame which 
shall open the dark caverns of their mind and flood 
them with the light of heaven. 

The natural degree of the human mind was 
opened by the call of Abraham and the appearance 
of the Jewish race, a distinct and peculiar people, 
and is also illustrated in the cotemporaneous his- 
tories of Greece, Assyria, and Rome. The pro- 
genitors of the people of this era were "remnants" 
of the older dispensation. The fire of their civil- 
ization was brought from the decaying altars of 
Egypt, which was the last or scientific sphere of 
the now corrupt spiritual Church. The meaning 
of correspondences was almost altogether lost, al- 
though some remains of the ancient wisdom were 
retained under the forms of allegory, myth, and 
fable. 

It was in this era of the world, that the Word 
of God, having already descended through the 
celestial and spiritual spheres, passed into the nat- 



384 THE END 0F THE world. 

ural degree of the human mind, and by means of 
a series of special providences, took on or clothed 
itself with literal expressions through the ritual and 
historical or institutional life of the Jewish people. 
This Word of God, so little understood in the 
christian world, and so utterly misunderstood out- 
side of it, is represented in the vision of Ezekiel, 
as to its interior forces and its exterior forms, by 
the living creatures with wings and the mighty 
wheels full of eyes which stood by them and moved 
with them. 

" When those went, these went; and when those stood, 
these stood ; and when those were lifted up from the earth, 
the wheels were lifted up over against them : for the spirit 
of the living creature was in the wheels." 

By successive downward steps both as to life and 
to doctrine, men became worse and worse, and the 
natural degree would have been closed, and man- 
kind would have sunk into a merely sensuo-corporeal 
life like that of the beasts, without any influx from 
the heavens above them, and so have lost their free- 
agency and rationality, becoming beasts in the human 
shape like apes and orang-outangs, but for a most 
astounding event, the incarnation of the Spirit of 
God in the person of the man Jesus Christ. 



THE KEYS OF HISTORY. 385 

The Lord bowed the heavens and came down, 
that is, He descended through the heavens, clothing 
Himself successively with the celestial, spiritual, 
and natural degrees; and finally penetrating the 
sensuo-corporeal sphere as a human being. He ap- 
peared upon earth, a Man among men. By His 
divine power, He reopened the closed heavens, the 
natural, the spiritual, the celestial, even to the divine. 
In His glorified Humanity, He is now the Medi- 
ator, the Way, the Life. By means of influent life 
from Him, our sensuo-corporeal sphere is reduced 
to order and made obedient to the higher faculties. 
We have a new natural, new science, new ration- 
ality, new life. Into this new natural based upon 
an orderly sensuo-corporeal, a new spiritual and a 
new celestial may be inserted. The descending 
work, the work of demolition was ended : celestial, 
spiritual, natural, had all perished or been closed 
by evil. The ascending work, the work of recon- 
struction began : natural, spiritual, celestial will all 
be opened again, and the forces of all the ages and 
all the heavens be united through Jesus Christ. 

The European races were able to receive this new 

or ascending natural degree of life with the greatest 

success. Therefore the apostolic Church has been 

established among them : they have been the centre 

b z 33 



386 THE END 0F THE WORLD. 

of divine influxes, and hence their great civilization 
and power. Their civilization differs from that of 
the old descending natural degree in this. It has 
been developed from below or without, by observa- 
tion, experiment, and the cultivation of the senses. 
The old forms were received from above or within 
by correspondences under spiritual pressure. Philos- 
ophers have not hitherto understood why the ancients 
did not study chemistry, botany, physiology, etc., 
etc., as we do. The reason was that they interpreted 
nature by their theological and philosophical systems 
and could not possibly do otherwise, because their 
mental operations were exceedingly different from 
ours. Even their astronomy was the outbirth of an 
astronomical religion. 

Ancient languages, empires, churches, usages, etc., 
are dead and extinct, because men successively ceased 
to live, think, and act in the spheres of life derived 
from the three distinct heavens, known as celestial, 
spiritual, and natural. There can be no retrograde 
or downward step in modern progress, only because 
our Lord lives forever in a divine Humanity, keep- 
ing the three degrees forever open in His own form, 
while the heavens are pressing down through Him 
to fill us with their life and power. 

I have abundantly shown in the preceding pages 



THE KEYS OF HISTORY. 3g7 

that the religious life of the new natural degree has 
exhausted itself in the corruptions and perversions 
of the apostolic Church, while at the same time the 
scientific and rational spheres of human thought 
have been so far perfected, as to form a basis for a 
better and grander superstructure of religion and 
philosophy. That superstructure can only be ob- 
tained by the reopening of the spiritual degree of 
the human mind, so that spiritual truth shall flow 
down from heaven and separate the true from the 
false in all things, appropriating to itself every 
thing which harmonizes with or corresponds to it in 
the natural sphere. 

The spiritual degree has been reopened by the 
intromission of Swedenborg into the spiritual world, 
and the revelation through him of the spiritual sense 
of the Word of God. New influxes from the world 
of spirits since the great judgment of 1757 are 
also descending into the human mind. We may be 
therefore sure that a great era of the triumphant 
reign of spiritual truth is approaching, which will 
destroy all old things root and branch, and generate 
a civilization which shall be nobler and purer than 
any which has hitherto existed. The opening of the 
celestial degree which must logically and inevitably 
follow, will let down that fire from heaven, which 



388 THE END OF THE WORLD. 

shall destroy all evil things from the earth, and in- 
augurate the commune of Christ among men. 

Discarding the perplexities of detail and grasping 
only the large facts, we may say that for all practical 
purposes three great races exist at present on the 
earth, with distinctive spiritual peculiarities. There 
is the European or white race, with the natural, ra- 
tional, and scientific plane of thought and life open 
and cultivated, and with the capacity of becoming 
either spiritual or celestial. Secondly, there is the 
Asiatic race, sensuo-corporeal outwardly, but capable 
of becoming spiritual by the opening of its interiors. 
Lastly, there is the African race, still more grossly 
sensuo-corporeal in exteriors but capable of be- 
coming celestial by the vivification of its interior 
potentialities. 

Now the Church is the medium of connection be- 
tween the Lord and man and even between man and 
nature. The Church exists at present in the regen- 
erating natural plane of the white race, through 
which the divine life flows outward to all men 
and things. Asia and Africa can never awaken 
from their spell-bound sleep, until spiritual and ce- 
lestial planes of thought and life are reopened in the 
Church. The Asiatic and African cannot be greatly 
influenced or successfully approached from the plane 



THE KEYS OF HISTORY. 389 

of life which is so congenial to us. Missionaries can 
do nothing; commercial intercourse can do nothing; 
military conquest can do nothing; external forces 
can do nothing. Only the opened senses of the 
Word of God and influxes from the opened heavens 
can bring about the mutual understandings of the 
nations and effect the solidarity of the race. 

It is curious and instructive to observe how the 
ancient or descending civilizations have a tendency to 
separate, like castes or discrete degrees, while the 
modern or ascending civilizations have a tendency 
to unite in the final production of one people and 
one religion. When the celestial degree of life was 
closed, Africa and America, which were probably 
one continent, were separated by a great convulsion 
of nature, and both of them passed away almost 
entirely from the knowledge and consciousness of 
the rest of the w r orld, which remained as utterly 
ignorant of them as the Christians of this day are of 
the meaning and quality of the celestial degree of life 
which is concealed in their own spiritual organisms. 

When the descending spiritual degree was closed, 
Hindostan, Tartary, China, Siam, Japan, etc., were 
no longer the centres of divine influx, but existed as 
only a remote and traditional fairyland to the Greek, 
the Roman, and the Jew. When the descending 

33* 



390 THE END 0F THE WORLD. 

natural was closed, the languages, the literatures, the 
governments, the whole institutional life of these 
latter nations passed away like the dead leaves of 
autumn, and for many centuries were utterly forgot- 
ten by the new composite civilization which was 
struggling for existence in Europe under the mould- 
ing influence of Christianity. 

The new or ascending natural having been opened 
in Europe, behold the germ of those mutual attrac- 
tions and consolidations which are still to be realized, 
for Christ will draw all men unto Himself. Europe 
comes into contact with Asia by the crusades, the 
military operations of the Moors and the Turks, and 
by the extensions of Russian and British influence 
over vast spaces of that ancient continent. Asia 
comes into contact with Africa by her unconquerable 
Arabs imposing the Mahometan religion on almost 
all the tribes of that extensive region. America is 
now discovered or rediscovered and serves as a com- 
mon gathering place for all the scattered and dis- 
cordant tribes of the earth. Africa comes into con- 
tact with Europe in America under the temporary 
forms of slavery, and it will meet Asia again on the 
same ground by the emigration from China and 
Japan to our Pacific coast and the importation of 
coolies into tropical America. 



THE KEYS OF HISTORY. 39 1 

Thus the " remnants" of all the dead Churches, 
the people who represent the celestial, spiritual, and 
natural degrees, of life, will meet in America, and 
not until their spheres have been all subordinated 
under a common religion, and co-ordinated under a 
common government in genuine brotherly relations, 
will the New Jerusalem descend in all its fulness 
upon earth, and the New Zion be established in the 
hearts of men. 

What begins and is effected in America will ex- 
tend to the whole w r orld. The Jew, the connecting 
link between the descending and ascending civiliza- 
tions, and therefore scattered throughout the globe, 
as a spiritual cement sacredly holding all the ele- 
ments together, will be the last to be regenerated, 
but the mystery of God cannot be finished without 
him. He will probably be restored to his ancient 
national possessions, and constitute the corner-stone 
of the final order of society, upon whom will rest 
the Word of God in its literal forms, made trans- 
lucent and glorious by the effluent rays of spiritual 
and celestial light, which will be received by other 
nations and peoples according to the spiritual state 
and quality of each. 

When the long and terrible convulsions of society 
and of nature which are impending shall have sub- 



392 THE END 0F THE WORLD. 

sided, when the days of tribulation shall be short- 
ened for the sake of the elect, when the opened Word 
and the opened heavens shall be the recognized 
sources of light and power, and the Eden of God 
be restored; the divine influxes will resume their 
old channels from the inmost to the outmost, from 
the will through the understanding into the deeds 
of the body; correspondences will re-acquire their 
old power ; and the external will be made to corre- 
spond to the internal in the minutest particulars. 
All evil things in man and nature will disappear : 
all deformities, ugliness, repulsiveness, and imper- 
fection ; and all the nations of the earth and every 
individual composing them will be lovely and beau- 
tiful, because they will be wise and good. 

These suggestions are merely skeletons of thought, 
to which it would require volumes to give a proper 
fulness and vitality. The application of the doc- 
trines of influx, order, series, degrees, and corre- 
spondences as expounded by Swedenborg, with the 
added light of his direct revelations, to the physical, 
moral, and historical study of man, will be produc- 
tive hereafter of immense results. Physiologists, 
ethnologists, and historians are collecting enormous 
masses of facts which only the New Church philos- 
ophy can harmonize or explain, and in that philos- 



THE KEYS OF HISTORY. 393 

ophy alone will the true Keys of History ever be 
discovered. 

Not only will the natural history of man and 
the philosophy of history be elevated thereby into 
rational light, but the moral government of God 
will be vindicated from many objections which have 
been urged against it. God created no man a savage, 
or black or yellow, or hideous and deformed, or 
idiotic or insane. Men have made themselves and 
their children so. God governs the hells and all 
states of human imperfection and barbarism with 
infinite mercy and wisdom. By confining a vast 
portion of the race for a definite and provisional 
period to a barbaric state, He saved them from total 
annihilation. Those people viewed in spiritual light 
are children, and the most of them have been un- 
questionably saved in heaven, while the professed 
christians, who knew their duty and did it not, have 
been cast out. The fears of orthodoxy for their sal- 
vation are wholly gratuitous. 

In the fulness of time when the celestial and 
spiritual life of heaven is to be ulti mated upon the 
earth, these people, preserved as a remnant or seed 
for that very purpose, will be the principal means 
and agents for a perfect reorganization of society. 
The end was foreseen in the beginning and provided 



394 THE END OF THE WORLD. 

for. He has led us by ways we knew not, and we 
may be sure that the wonders and mercies of the 
past will be immeasurably eclipsed by those of the 
future. 

" The light of the moon shall be as the light of the 
sun, and the light of the sun shall be sevenfold. 11 

In conclusion, I beg the reader to review and fix 
in his memory the three wonderful visions which 
have been explained in this book : the vision of the 
man whose parts were composed successively of 
gold, silver, copper, and iron ; the vision of the 
four riders who appeared one after another on white, 
red, black, and pale horses ; and the vision of the 
four beasts that rose successively out of the sea, the 
lion, the bear, the leopard, and that terrible beast 
without name. Let him remember that each of 
these visions represents the spiritual states of each 
one of the four Churches, corresponding to their 
spring, summer, autumn, and winter, or to their 
morning, noon, evening, and night. Let him ob- 
serve how all these things have been fulfilled in the 
history of the past ; how the night has ended and 
a new moon is spread upon the mountains; how the 
winter is over and the voices of a new spring are 
heard in the land ; how the great image is about to 



THE KEYS OF HISTORY. 395 

be broken into pieces and the kingdom of the Lord 
to take its place forever. 

All Churches have been parts of one universal 
Church. All revelations have been fragments of 
one infinite revelation. All the movements of his- 
tory are reflected and coherent images of the ad- 
vancing spiritual life of man. The incarnation of 
Jehovah in the person of Jesus Christ is the central 
fact of the universe, the pivot about which all things 
revolve, the mystery which holds in its unfathom- 
able depths the secret of the beginning and the end 
of the world. 



THE END. 



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